ble. Had this motion been carried, you might have
introduced another bill, omitting the "objectionable details," but you
voted with the slaveholders. The slaveholders then moved that the bill
be read a third time. Had this been lost, there would have been a chance
of correcting the "objectionable details." Again you voted with the
slaveholders, and a third time, also, on the main question.

I will now, Sir, call your attention to the disastrous influence which
your law has exerted on the _moral sense_ of the community. Says
Coleridge, "To dogmatize a crime, that is, to teach it as a doctrine, is
itself a crime." Of this crime of dogmatizing crime, Mr. Webster, and
most of our cotton politicians, and, alas! many of our fashionable,
genteel divines, are guilty; nor are you innocent, Sir, who in your law
require "GOOD citizens" to aid in hunting and enslaving their
fellow-men.

In former years, and before Mr. Webster had undergone his metamorphosis,
he thus, in a speech at New York, expressed himself in regard to the
antislavery agitation at the North. "It [slavery] has arrested the
_religious feeling_ of the country; it has taken strong hold of the
consciences of men. He is a rash man indeed, little conversant with
human nature, and especially has he a very erroneous estimate of the
character of the people of this country, who supposes that a feeling of
this kind is _to be trifled with or despised_." This gentleman has
become the rash man shadowed forth in his speech, and is trifling with
and despising the religious feeling of the North. In his street speech
in Boston, in favor of slave-hunting, he avowed that he was well aware
that the return of fugitives "is a topic that must excite prejudices,"
and that the question for Massachusetts to decide was, "whether she will
conquer her own prejudice." In his letter to the citizens of
Newburyport, he sneeringly alludes to the "cry that there is a rule for
the government of public men and private men which is superior to the
Constitution," and he scornfully intimates that Mr. Horace Mann, who had
objected to your law as wicked, would do well "to appeal at once, as
others do, to that high authority which sits enthroned above the
Constitution and the laws"; and he gives an extract from a nameless
English correspondent, in which the writer remarks, "Religion is an
excellent thing except in politics," a maxim exceedingly palatable to
very many of our politicians. Aware that the imp