Where does the proud Empire
State wish to be recorded in that great history, which is being so
rapidly filled out with the records of this "irrepressible
conflict"? For myself, a humble citizen of the State, I ask no
prouder record for her than that, in the year 1860, she enacted that
_the moment a man sets foot on her soil, he is free, against the
world_!"
Wendell Phillips, one of earth's bravest and best, made a speech at
Worcester, 1851, from which I make the following extract:--"Mr.
Mann, Mr. Giddings, and other leaders of the Free Soil party, are
ready to go to the death against the Fugitive Slave Law. It never
should be enforced, they say. It robs men of the jury trial, it robs
them of _habeas corpus_, and forty other things. This is a very good
position. But how much comfort would it have been to Ellen Crafts,
if she had been sent back to Macon, to know that it had been done
with a scrupulous observance of all the forms of _habeas corpus_ and
jury trial? When she got back, some excellent friend might have said
to her, 'My dear Ellen, you had the blessed privilege of _habeas
corpus_ and jury trial.
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