TES HUSBAND AND WIFE, he cries
out, "BRAVO! THIS IS THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED
STATES!" [Bravo! C'est la Declaration d'Independence des Etats Unis.]
One of our distinguished College-professors, lately on a tour in Europe,
had his attention called, while passing along the street of a German
city, to the pictorial representation of a WHITE MAN SCOURGING A
SUPPLICATING COLORED FEMALE, with this allusion underwritten:--"A
SPECIMEN OF EQUALITY--FROM REPUBLICAN AMERICA."
Truly might our countryman have exclaimed in the language, if not with
the generous emotions of the Trojan hero, when he beheld the noble deeds
of his countrymen pencilled in a strange land--
--"Quis jam locus--
Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?"
]
Instead of being thus seated on a "heaven-kissing hill," and seen of all
in its pure radiance; instead of enjoying its delightful airs, and
imparting to them the healthful savor of justice, truth, mercy,
magnanimity, see what a picture we present;--our cannibal burnings of
human beings--our Lynch courts--our lawless scourgings and capital
executions, not only of slaves, but of freemen--our demoniac mobs raging
through the streets of our cities and large towns at midday as well as
at midnight, shedding innocent blood, devastating property, and applying
the incendiaries' torch to edifices erected and dedicated to FREE
DISCUSSION--the known friends of order, of law, of liberty, of the
Constitution--citizens, distinguished for their worth at home, and
reflecting honor on their country abroad, shut out from more than half
our territory, or visiting it at the hazard of their lives, or of the
most degrading and painful personal inflictions--freedom of speech and
of the press overthrown and hooted at--the right of petition struck down
in Congress, where, above all places, it ought to have been maintained
to the last--the people mocked at, and attempted to be gagged by their
own servants--the time the office-honored veteran, who fearlessly
contended for the _right_, publicly menaced for words spoken in his
place as a representative of the people, with an indictment by a
slaveholding grand jury--in fine, the great principles of government
asserted by our fathers in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied
in our Constitution, with which they won for us the sympathy, the
admiration of the world--all forgotten, dishonoured, despised, trodden
under foot! And this for slavery!!
Ho
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