But the law against witchcraft was not triumphant long. The General Court of the Province first became penitent, and asked pardon of God for "all the errors of his servants and people in the late tragedy." Jurymen united in condemning and lamenting the delusion to which they had yielded under the decision of the judges, and acknowledged that they had brought the reproach of wrongful bloodshed on their native land. Sewall, one of the judges, and author of the early tract against Slavery, "The Selling of Joseph," whose name lives freshly in his liberty-loving descendant [Hon. S. E. SEWALL] [_applause_], stood up in his place at church, before the congregation, and implored the prayers of the people, that the errors he had committed might not be visited by the judgments of an avenging God on his country, his family, or himself. And now, in a manuscript diary of this departed judge, may be read, on the margin against the contemporary record, in his own handwriting, words of saddest interjection and sorrow: _Væ! væ! væ!_ Woe! woe! woe![139] [_Sensation._] [139] Holmes, Annals, Vol. I. p. 440, note. In similar spirit, John Winthrop, the early Governor of Massachusetts, on his death-bed refused to sign an order to banish a heterodox person, saying, "I have done too much of that work already."--Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, Vol. I. p. 142. The parallel between the law against witchcraft and the Fugitive Act is not yet complete. It remains for our Legislature, successor of that original General Court, to lead the penitential march. [_Laughter._] In the slave cases there have been no jurymen to recant [_laughter_]; and it is too much, perhaps, to expect any magistrate who sanctioned the cruelty to imitate by public penitence the magnanimity of other days. Yet it is not impossible that future generations may be permitted to read, in some newly exhumed diary or letter by one of these troubled functionaries, words of woe not unlike those wrung from the soul of Sewall. [_Sensation._] * * * * * Fellow-citizens, one word in conclusion: Be of good cheer. ["_That's it!_"] I know well the difficulties and responsibilities of the contest; but not on this account do I bate a jot of heart or hope. [_Applause._] At this time, in our country, there is little else to tempt into public life an honest man, who wishes, by something that he has done, to leave the world better than he found it. There is little else to afford any of those satisfactions which an honest man can covet. Nor is there any cause which so surely promises final success. There is nothing good--not a breathing of the common air--which is not on our side. Ours, too, are those great allies described by the poet,-- "Exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."