Such has been my cherished conviction for thirty years, as it has been yours. It is because human governments are founded on the right to kill men, in violence and murder, and on that revengeful doctrine of "blood for blood," that I have never taken any part in their administration, by voting, or otherwise. I have no more respect for the authority of the General or State governments, than for that of the wolf or hyena. To me, they are all, as now constituted, but "covenants with Death, and agreements with hell." These governments, in their essential spirit, principles and practices, are a deliberate and formal rejection of those sacred and only truths that are absolutely conservative of "Life, Liberty and Happiness," i.e.,—"Love your enemies," "Forgive as you would be forgiven," "Return to no man evil for evil, but overcome evil with good." They all ignore the spirit and life of the Martyr of Calvary. And the one deep anguish of my heart, as I look on the martyr of Harper's Ferry, is, that his hands, ever so faithful to lib- to liberty, are stained with a brother's blood.
But while this is "the way, the truth and the life" to me, ninety and nine out of every hundred of the enslaved and enslavers, North and South, politicians and priests, in their own defence, insist that armed resistance to slaveholders is obedience to God; and that it is the right and duty of the enslaved to defend themselves, their wives and daughters, against the cruelties, the rape and rapine of their enslavers, by arms and blood; and to kill, slay and destroy all who invade their homes, to drag the objects of their affection to the auction-block, to be sold like brutes. In their own case, they hold that, if they were slaves, it would be the right and duty of John Brown, and of all freemen, to help them to insurrection. I hold them responsible to their own accepted laws of life, to use the same means to defend the Southern slaves, and their wives and children, which they would use, or wish others to use, to defend themselves. I would say to the people of the North: "Go, incite slaves to run away, and guide them on their way to Canada, as John Brown proposed to do; and if slaveholders or their ecclesiastical and political minions attempt to oppose them, and to re-enslave them, defend them, as Brown proposed to do, by the same weapons you would use were you, and your
