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Sabbath-breakers, and anarchists, there can be but one result arrived at by prudence and patriotism.
They are dangerous assemblies—calculated for mischief, and treasonable in their character and purposes.
Though the law cannot reach them, public opinion can; and as, in England, a peaceful dissent from such doctrines as these fellows would promulgate—a strong expression of dissent from them—would be conveyed by hisses and by counter statements and expositions, so here in New York we may anticipate that there are those who will enter the arena of discussion, and send out the true opinion of the public.
That half-a-dozen madmen should manufacture opinion for the whole community, is not to be tolerated.
It is to be hoped that, before long, we shall learn what public opinion upon the Union truly is—and what interest all the masses have in the perpetuity of the Sabbath and our institutions.
This pious ruffianism was reinforced by the editor of
1 the
Globe on the same day. ‘The right to assemble
2 peaceably for the overthrow of the
Government is nowhere guaranteed by the
Constitution. . . . No public building, no, not even the streets, must be desecrated by such a proposed assemblage of
traitors.’
As for ‘one of the heralded orators for this Anniversary,’ ‘the black
Douglass,’ who, at the
Syracuse Convention in January,
3 had invoked immediate disunion, and alleged that
Washington,
Jefferson, and
Patrick Henry ‘were strangers to any just idea of Liberty’—‘This was uttered, says a contemporary, and “no hand was raised to fell the speaker to the earth!”
’ But, added the
Globe, “if this
Douglass shall re-proclaim his
Syracuse treason here, and any man shall arrest him in his diabolical career, and not injure him, thousands will exclaim, in language of patriotic love for the
Constitution and the rights of the
South, ‘did he not strike the Villain dead?’
”
Lib. 20.77.
W. L. Garrison to his Wife.
4
I arrived here safely yesterday afternoon at 4 o'clock, in
5 company with
Phillips, Francis and
Edmund Jackson,
Mr. May and his mother,
Mr. Hovey, and other dear anti-slavery
