Jay Peledge's List: US History I

• The fact which the politician faces is merely that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves.
• • Biting attack on politicians. 
• I would recommend to him the profession of a Governor.

  • Politicians are the ones in position to change the laws, but they are useless as they do nothing when most is required of them. Attacks MA Governor. 
• he made a speech to his accomplices, at a congratulatory supper!

  • Again likens Governor to a criminal: "accomplices"
• I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say.
• Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters?

  • Carries attack in both Fugitive Slave Law and Mexican War. 
• As if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others. Nowadays, men wear a fool's-cap, and call it a liberty-cap

  • Slavery contradicts principles of liberty fought for in American Revolution.
• The Commissioner on her case is God; not Edward G. God, but simply God.
• But if any of them will tell me that to make a man into a sausage would be much worse — would be any worse — than to make him into a slave — than it was to enact the Fugitive Slave Law, I will accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction without a difference. The one is just as sensible a proposition as the other.
• Such judges as these are merely the inspectors of a pick-lock and murderer's tools, to tell him whether they are in working order or not,

  • Slave holders and their "accomplices" continue to be referred to as criminals. 
• Let us not send to the city for aught more essential than our broadcloths and groceries; or, if we read the opinions of the city, let us entertain opinions of our own.

  • Division between urban centers and rural outskirts. 
• I repeat the testimony of many an intelligent foreigner, as well as my own convictions, when I say, that probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country.

  • Press is more damaging than Church ever was. 
• And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worse, and not the better, nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.
• And, for the most part, they did this, one would say, because they thought so to secure the approbation of their patrons, not being aware that a sounder sentiment prevailed to any extent in the heart of the Commonwealth.

  • Reminds me of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead. 
• I do not know whether the Boston Herald is still in existence (24), but I remember to have seen it about the streets when Sims was carried off. Did it not act its part well-serve its master faithfully! How could it have gone lower on its belly? How can a man stoop lower than he is low? do more than put his extremities in the place of the head he has? than make his head his lower extremity? When I have taken up this paper with my cuffs turned up, I have heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column. I have felt that I was handling a paper picked out of the public gutters, a leaf from the gospel of the gambling-house, the groggery, and the brothel, harmonizing with the gospel of the Merchants' Exchange.
• it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them.

  • Material concerns take precedent over humanity concerns. 
• I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.

  • Humans first, Americans second. 
• The question is, not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the Devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God — in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor — by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.

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