Right of Government,” in which he endeavored to bring his hearers to the conclusion that, “wise, practical men would allow the laws of the land, which have been enacted in due form, to have their course and be executed, until we can so far change the current of public opinion that what is objectionable in those laws may be corrected.” He conceded, indeed, that “there are cases when rulers may be rightfully resisted, and when revolution is a duty; yet these are extreme cases, and require for their justification the most imperative necessity.” He said this all unconscious, it would seem, that such an extreme case was upon us; unconscious, and leaving his hearers unconscious, that the Fugitive Slave Law must be resisted, or the people of Massachusetts would consent to become menials of the slaveholders, kidnappers, robbers of men, bloodhounds. The excellent Dr. E. S. Gannett, of Boston, was heard to say, more than once, very emphatically, and to justify it, “that he should feel it to be his duty to turn away from his door a fugitive slave,--unfed, unaided in any way, rather than set at naught the law of the land.” And Rev. Dr. Dewey, whom we accounted one of the ablest expounders and most eloquent defenders of our Unitarian faith,--Dr. Dewey was reported to have said at two different times, in public lectures or speeches during the fall of 1850 and the winter of 1851, that “he would send his _mother_ into slavery, rather than endanger the Union, by resisting this law enacted by the constituted government of the nation.” He has often denied that he spoke thus of his “maternal relative,” and therefore I allow that he was misunderstood. But he has repeatedly acknowledged that he did say, “I would consent that my own brother, my own son, should go, _ten times rather_ would I go myself into slavery, than that this Union should be sacrificed.” The rhetoric of this sentence may be less shocking, but the principle that underlies it is equally immoral and demoralizing. It is, that the inalienable, God-given rights of man ought to be violated, outraged, rather than overturn or seriously endanger a human institution called a government. Although our denomination at that time was numerically a very small one, yet it was so prominent, not only in Boston and its immediate vicinity, but before the whole nation, and in view of all the world, that it seemed to me to be a matter of great moral consequence that it should take and maintain a truly Christian stand respecting this high-handed, glaring attempt to bring our Northern free States into entire subjection to the slaveholding oligarchy. Therefore, at the next annual meeting of the American Unitarian Association, in May, 1851, I offered the following Preamble and Resolution:--