We have at least insolence, we poor, and blows of the mouth, since their weapons stop our blows of the teeth. I went away like them. They lowered their heads and thought. For my part I cried out, I turned about and cried, 'You be hanged!'"
"Ah, now, indeed! I didn't expect anything like that," said Pierre Bousset. "One raises children to make gentle-folk of them, so that they will work a little less than you. Now then, in God's name! go and demand a place of those for whom you have lost your own!"
The Duty of Civil Disobedience
By Henry David Thoreau
(The New England essayist, 1817-1862, author of "Walden,"
went to prison because he refused to pay taxes to a government
which returned fugitive slaves to the South. It is narrated that
Emerson came to him and asked, "Henry, what are you doing in
here?" "Waldo," was the answer, "what are you doing out of
here?")
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
the true place for a just man is also a prison. The
proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts
has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits,
is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the
State by her own act, as they have already put themselves
out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive
slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the
Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find
them; on that separate but more free and honorable
ground, where the State places those who are not with
