This is kind of like Jimmy Carter, How sometimes the best person doesn't make the best president, because they lack the ability to persuade the caucus or play the politician.
All machines have their friction;
and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate,
it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes
to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let
us not have such a machine any longer.
"This
principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance
is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance
on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on
the other."(
there be
some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.(15)
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to
the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming
themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands
in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do,
It
is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that
Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not
a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants
and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than
they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and
to Mexico, cost what it may.
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight
moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions;
and betting naturally accompanies it.
There is but little virtue in the action
of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition
of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because
there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They
will then be the only slaves.
"I should like to have them order me out to help put down
an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico; — see if I would
go";
ow many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country?
Hardly one. Does not America offer any inducement
for men to settle here? The American has dwindled
into an Odd Fellow (17) — one
who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and
a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose first and
chief concern,
and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and
so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute