that ever sat in Boston would become an object of
universal merriment and ridicule, that should presume to arrest and
cause to be indicted any man for free speaking in old Faneuil Hall.
Merriment, I say, for who would not laugh at a philosopher who would
set snares for the stars, and fix his net to catch the sun, and
regulate their indiscreet shining. Darkness and silence are excellent
for knaves and tyrants; but the attempt to command the one or the
other in the North, changes the knave to an imbecile and the tyrant to
a fool.

But should any power, against the precedents of the past, the spirit
of our people, the theory of our civil polity and the rights of
individual man succeed, and make headway against free speech, and put
it in jeopardy, it would convulse the very frame-work of society.
There would be no time for a revolution--there would be an _eruption_,
and fragmentary Judges, Courts and their minions would fly upward
athwart the sky, like stones and balls of flame driven from the
vomiting crater of a furious volcano! No. This is a right like the
right of breathing. This is a liberty that broods upon us like the
atmosphere. The grand American doctrine that men may speak what they
think, and may print what they speak--that all public measures shall
have free public discussion--cannot be shaken; and any party must be
intensely American that can afford to destroy the very foundation of
American principle that public questions shall be publicly discussed,
and public procedure be publicly agreed upon. Right always gains in
the light, and Wrong in the dark. An owl can whip an eagle in the
night!

The South, holding a heathen theory of man--an aristocratic theory of
society,--is bound to hold, and does hold, a radically opposite
practice in respect to rights of speech and freedom of the press.

There is not freedom of opinion in the South and there cannot be.

Men may there talk of a thousand things--of all religious doctrines,
of literature, of art, of public political measures--but no man has
liberty to talk as he pleases about the structure of southern society,
and apply to the real facts of southern life and southern internal
questions that searching investigation and public exposure which, in
the North, brings every possible question to the bar of public
opinion, and makes society boil like a pot!

Yes, you may speak of Slavery, if you will defend it; you may preach
about it, if you shingle its roof with S