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delivered in the Senate have been stopped at the Post-Office; booksellers who had received them have been mobbed, and on at least one occasion the speeches have been solemnly proceeded against by a Grand Jury.
All this is natural, for tyranny is condemned to be consequent with itself. Proclaim Slavery to be a permanent institution, instead of a temporary Barbarism, soon to pass away, and then, by the unhesitating logic of self-preservation, all things must yield to its support. The safety of Slavery becomes the supreme law. And since Slavery is endangered by liberty in any form, therefore all liberty must be restrained. Such is the philosophy of this seeming paradox in a Republic. And our Slave masters show themselves apt in this work. Violence and brutality are their ready instruments, quickened always by the wakefulness of suspicion, and perhaps often by the restlessness of uneasy conscience. Everywhere in the Slave States the Lion's Mouth of Venice, where citizens were anonymously denounced, is open; nor are the gloomy prisons and the Bridge of Sighs wanting.
This spirit has recently shown itself with such intensity and activity as to constitute what has been properly termed a reign of terror. Northern men, unless they happen to be delegates to a Democratic Convention, are exposed in their travels, whether of business or health, to the operation of this system. They are watched and dogged, as if in a land of Despotism; they are treated with the meanness of a disgusting tyranny, and live in peril always of personal indignity, and often of life and limb. Complaint has sometimes been made of the wrongs to American citizens in Mexico; but during the last year, more outrages on American citizens have been perpetrated in the Slave States than m Mexico. Here, again, I have no time for details, which have been already presented in other quarters. But the instances are from all conditions of life. In Missouri, a Methodist clergyman, suspected of being an Abolitionist, was taken to prison, amidst threats of tar and feathers. In Arkansas, a schoolmaster was driven from the State. In Kentucky, a plain citizen from Indiana, on a visit to his friends, was threatened with death by the rope. In Alabama, a simple person from Connecticut, peddling books, was thrust into prison, amidst eries of “Shoot him! hang him!" In Virginia, a Shaker, from
