still a monument to Liberty. Not the will of a million could destroy the right of that one. And though I admit that a society which sanctions slavery must treat as a murderer the slave who kills in his effort to escape,—nevertheless, by posterity, and in a society which has repudiated slavery, that act will be very differently regarded; and so long as the man's aim when he committed that legal offence was freedom, we, who have repudiated slavery, look upon him not as a murderer but as a fighter in a just cause.
We are in a society to-day which tolerates and even sanctions things which to-morrow will be regarded as slavery is regarded now. While society thus chooses to establish evil it is driven in self-defence to treat those who rebel as criminals. But posterity will not so think of them; and the greater the forces of the majority which stood against them when they struck—the more will it admire and reverence, and approve. Surely a startling commentary on the "rights" of majorities: approval of the minority in an inverse proportion to its size!
Now, you might have a State almost equally divided into what were, broadly speaking, opposed interests; under certain circumstances, for instance, (circumstances which have actually occurred in the past) manufacturing and agricultural interests might be opposed. If, then, you accepted majority rule as a blind dogma, those two interests
