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

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Nevertheless, the danger of this propaganda was recognised, and before long the Abolitionists were being stoned and shot, their presses smashed, and their meetings broken up; a “broadcloth mob” put a rope round the neck of the editor of the Liberator and dragged him through the streets of the city. And still, in spite of this, the agitation went on. All the “cranks” of the country gradually rallied about the movement. Their leader was a woman’s suffragist, an infidel, a prohibitionist, and a vegetarian; he denounced the Constitution as “an agreement with Death, and a covenant with Hell.” There was one man among them who addressed meetings with clanking chains about his wrists, and a three-pronged iron slave-collar about his neck; and who declared to the people of a town that they “had better establish among them a hundred rum-shops, fifty gambling-houses and ten brothels, than one church.” They allowed Negroes to speak on the platform with them, and they opened schools for Negro girls, or tried to, until these were broken up. One of them refused to pay taxes to a slave-holding government, and went to jail for it.