applied to was a little shy of the business. Yet that
commissioner is not a very scrupulous man. I mean in
the various parties he has wriggled through, he has not
left the reputation of any excessive and maidenly coyness
in moral matters, and a genius for excessive scrupulousness as to means or ends. Even a hunker minister informed me that he "would certainly aid a fugitive." But, after the Union Meeting, the clouds of darkness gathered together, and it set in for a storm; the kidnappers went and rough-ground their sword on the grindstone of the church, a navy chaplain turning the crank; and all our hopes fell to the ground.
"Vice is a monster of such frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
But seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."
The relentless administration of Mr Fillmore has been as cruel as the law they framed. Mr Webster has thrust the red-hot iron hook into the flesh of thousands of his fellow-citizens. He and his kidnappers came to a nation scattered and peeled, meted out and trodden down; they have ground the poor creatures to powder under their hoof. I wish I could find an honourable motive for such deeds, but hitherto no analysis can detect it, no solar microscope of charity can bring such a motive to light. The end is base, the means base, the motive base.
Yet one charge has been made against the Government, which seems to me a little harsh and unjust. It has been said the administration preferred low and contemptible men as their tools; judges who blink at law, advocates of infamy, and men cast off from society for perjury, for nameless crimes, and sins not mentionable in English speech; creatures "not so good as the dogs that licked Lazarus's sores; but, like flies, still buzzing upon anything that is raw." There is a semblance of justice in the charge: witness Philadelphia, Buffalo, Boston; witness New York. It is true for kidnappers the Government did take men that looked "like a bull-dog just come to man^s estate;" men whose face declared them, "if not the devil, at least his twin-brother." There are kennels of the courts wherein there settles down all that the law breeds most foul, loathsome, and hideous and abhorrent to the eye of day; there
