Let
lawyers decide trivial cases. Business men may arrange that among
themselves. If they were the interpreters of the everlasting
laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing. A
counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half
in free! What kind of laws for free men can you expect from that?
I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life,
but for his character,--his immortal life; and so it becomes your
cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred
years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain
Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not
without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel
of light.
I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man
in all the country should be hung. Perhaps he saw it himself. I
almost fear that I may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a
prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death.
"Misguided"! "Garrulous"! "Insane"! "Vindictive"! So ye write
in your easy-chairs, and thus he wounded responds from the floor of
the Armory, clear as a cloudless sky, true as the voice of nature
is: "No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my
Maker.
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