our aristocracy, a small, but compact body, measures are
often carried into laws that are very distasteful to multitudes; but
such a mean, vile law as the Fugitive Slave Bill could not pass in
England."

The English press, Whig, Tory, and Radical, is indignant at the
atrocities of your law. The taunt of our slaveholders, that the English
had better reform abuses at home, is thus met by a radical journal (_The
People_):--"The Americans laugh at us when we speak of American slavery,
so long as so many of our fellow-subjects in England and Ireland are
perishing from starvation through monarchical and aristocratical
tyranny. We answer, that the Americans _know_ that the men and women who
lift up their voices against American slavery are the enemies of British
tyranny and oppression."

Your law, Sir, degrades the national character abroad; its excessive
servility to Southern dictation excites the contempt of the slaveholders
for the easy, selfish virtue of their Northern auxiliaries, while its
outrages upon religion, justice, humanity, and the dearest principles of
personal freedom, under pretence of preserving the Union, weaken the
attachment of conscientious men for a confederacy which requires such
horrible sacrifices for its continuance. All these evils might have been
easily avoided by a law satisfying every requirement of the
Constitution, and yet treating the alleged fugitive as a MAN, and
granting him the same protection as is accorded to an alleged murderer.
God gave you, Sir, an opportunity for which you ought to have been
grateful, of illustrating your Puritan descent by standing forth before
the nation as an advocate of justice and freedom, and of the rights of
the poor and oppressed. Through a blind devotion to a political leader,
you rejected the palm which Providence tendered to your acceptance, and
have indelibly associated your name with cruelty and injustice. Had you
retired from the notice of the public, as you did from the suffrages of
the electors, you had acted wisely. In an evil hour for yourself, you
stood forth as the champion of the Fugitive Slave Law. Its enemies
rejoice in your rashness, for your feeble apology has rendered its
deformities more prominent, and, by failing to vindicate, you have
virtually confessed its abominations. May you live, Sir, to deplore the
grievous error you have committed, and, by your future efforts in behalf
of human freedom and happiness, atone for the wound they have