Not a case occurs without endangering the public peace. Workmen are brutally dragged from employments to which they are wedded by years of successful labor; husbands are ravished from wives, and parents from children. Everywhere there is disturbance,--at Detroit, Buffalo, Harrisburg, Syracuse, Philadelphia, New York, Boston. At Buffalo the fugitive was cruelly knocked by a log of wood against a red-hot stove, and his mock trial commenced while the blood still oozed from his wounded head. At Syracuse he was rescued by a sudden mob; so also at Boston. At Harrisburg the fugitive was shot; at Christiana the Slave-Hunter was shot. At New York unprecedented excitement, always with uncertain consequences, has attended every case. Again at Boston a fugitive, according to received report, was first seized under base pretext that he was criminal; arrested only after deadly struggle; guarded by officers acting in violation of the State laws; tried in a court-house girdled by chains, contrary to the Common Law; finally surrendered to Slavery by trampling on the criminal process of the State, under an escort in violation again of the laws of the State, while the pulpits trembled, and the whole people, not merely "uneasy," but swelling with ill-suppressed indignation, though, for the sake of order and tranquillity, without violence, witnessed the shameful catastrophe. Oppression by an individual is detestable; but oppression by law is worse. Hard and inscrutable, when the law, to which the citizen naturally looks for protection, becomes itself a standing peril. As the sword takes the place of the shield, despair settles down like a cloud. Montesquieu painted this most cruel tyranny, when he said that the man is drowned by the very plank on which he thought to escape.[198] And Moses exposes a kindred harshness, when, in commandment to the Israelites, he mysteriously enjoins; "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk"[199] Alas! every sacrifice under the form of law is only a repetition of this forbidden offence. The victim is the innocent kid, and the law is its mother's milk. [198] Grimm, Correspondance, Février, 1786, Tom. XIV. pp. 453, 454. [199] Deuteronomy, xiv. 21.