Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

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Way back in the early thirties, eight or ten more or less insane fanatics—“apostate priests and unsexed women,” as one writer described them—had got together and begun an agitation for a wholly impossible and visionary (to say nothing of revolutionary and unconstitutional) programme—“the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves.” They formed a society and started a paper called the Liberator. When governors of Southern states protested concerning it, the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, Mayor of Boston, wrote as follows: “It appeared upon inquiry that no member of the city government, nor any person of my acquaintance, had ever heard of the publication. Sometime afterward it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few ignorant persons of all colours. This information, with the consent of the Aldermen, I communicated to the above named governors, with an utterance of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of the people.”