Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[392] bankruptcy which the wasteful system of slave-labor must occasion. In this generation, no Slave State in the Union has made the year's ends meet. In counting the wealth of the Union, such States are a minus quantity. Should the Gulf States, however, return, I have no doubt the United States treasury will be called on to pay all these secession debts.

Disunion is honor. I will not point to the equivocating hypocrisy of all our Northern leaders. I will not count up all the bankrupt statesmen,--blighted names,--skeletons marking the sad path of the caravan over our desert of seventy years,--they are too familiar. As years roll on, history metes out justice. But take the last instance, --take Mr. Richard H. Dana, Jr., as example, a name historic for generations, a scholar of world-wide fame. He finds in the Constitution the duty of returning fugitive slaves, all alike, “the old and the ignorant, the young and the beautiful,” to be surrendered to the master, whether he be man or brute. Mr. Dana avows his full readiness to perform this legal duty. All honor at least to the shameless effrontery with which he avows his willingness. i lost of our public men, like the English Tories of 1689, are “ashamed to name what they are not ashamed to do.” He paints the hell of slavery in words that make the blood cold, and then boasts, this Massachusetts scholar,gentleman, his friends would call him,--boasts that no man can charge him with having ever said one word against the surrender of fugitive slaves! Counsel in all the Boston slave-cases, he “never suffered himself to utter one word which any poor fugitive negro, or any friend of his, could construe into an assertion that a fugitive slave should not be restored” !

He unblushingly claims merit for himself and Massachusetts,--I doubt if, in the scornful South, he will have “his claim allowed,” --that he and Massachusetts have