Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1859-04-15
SIGNS OF PROMISE.

SIGNS OF PROMISE.
Many years of shrewd management could
not accomplish so much for sound sense
and good morals in politics as the gentlemen
who commemorated the birthday of Jefferson
accomplished in single evening. For the
diffusion of worthy sentiments and the ex-
preston of high and determined purposes, in
language worthy of ourposition in the Republic
and of our history, there has been nothing like
it since the days when Sumner, Palfrey, Phil
lips, Adams, Mann and Rantoul, were the fight
ing men in our ranks. We trust it will prove
the initiative of new and better policy in the
public affairs of the Commonwealth.
Since the melancholy rout and disorganiza-
ton of 1854, the party now known as the Re.
publican party has not enjoyed the luxury of
fixed and conscntaneous opiuions on questions
of public policy. Some of the time, oppressed
by circumstances over which they had no
control" and for the rest busily engaged in
fixing up little political arrangements, they
have paid slight regard to that consistency and
defiant integrity of purpose, without which
success is not very desirable and not at all de-
served. They have arrived at point now,
where they can afford to put upon record, as
the policy to be immovably adhered to hereaf
ter, the sentiments which we applaud at public
dinners, and which the consciences of all men
approve.
One or two features connected with the Par
ker House festivities it would be difficult for a
stranger to understand. We have it from pref
ty good authority that few of those gentle
men who in the Legislature voted against the
Personal Liberty Bill on account of the Urea
son" there was in it, were detected at the festi-
val applauding with the most painful vehe-
mence those particular sentiments on which
alone the bill could be justified. None saluted
the tables with more nervous energy than
they, or set their glasses upon merrier dance
when the Hon, Thomas Davis and the Hon.
Erastus Hopkins maintained that the slave
holder as such had no rights beyond the black
circle of his local law, and that our State gov
ernments, individual and independent sover-
eighties, cutting the legal Knots ,uhich they could
not sundcr, were bound by the gravest obliga-
tions of public duty to protect every man,
whose foot presses their soil And when
Carl Shurz, the representative of the State
where the Fugitive Slave Law has been dis
tinctly nullifed, and who won his fame and his
most enduring laurels in the political contests
in defence of that act of notification, rose to
speak, no voices rang out louder peal than
those which, fortnight ago, uttered tremu-
lous negative against bill to protect personal
freedom in our own Commonwealth
We regard the change, though somewhst
sudden and impulsive, as in the highest de-
gree suspicious. We accept the early repent
ance as an evidence that, with another oppor-
tunity of wholly relieving the State from the
possible consequences of a fraudulent and un-
constitutional assignment to save-catchers,
they would not cast it aside for the poor ex-
cuse that "it is worse to enact treason than to
act it." Treason 1t is an old alarm, and,
however falsely it may be given, frightens
many of us still 1t is time to silence it in our
politics forever. The constitution itself defines
"treason" under our government; and the
Star Chamber and the Inquisition will sooner
revive in the lands of which they were once
the terror and the scourge, than that agency
of oppression, constructive treason, will revive
in our own. The Fugitive Slave Law, wicked
as it appears to every enlightened conscience,
unconstitutional as we all believe it to be, and
as it has been pronounced by some of the most
learned jurists in the land, is not treason. 1t
does not levy war against the United States.
Are we to be assaied with the cry of treason"
for resisting that enactment, by the authority
not only of our common humanity, but also
of the State whose authority, in matters relat-
ing to the rights of men, within her borders,
was never delegated to any power on earth
The day is not distant when Massachusetts,
will redeem and fortify, by every exercise of
lawful power, that independence which she
has been accustomed to hold in abeyance to
constructions of the Constitutions which were
never contemplated by its founders, and are
abhorrent to the moral convictions of her peo-
pie. The decree is irrevocable. The position
of that man will not be enviable hereafter, who,
either by open and avowed hostility, or by
timed and apologize resistance, attempts to de-
feat or defer its fulfillment
HAIL WIscoNsIN.-We have already spoken
of the interesting character of the late election
of Judge of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin,
as being contested on the question of sustaining
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