Now that the recent death of Wendell Phillips brings freshly to mind the bitter opposition with which the early champions of abolution were treated in Boston and vicinity, it is pleasant to find in the musty records of the Dochester Plantation emphatic evidence that they not only recognized slavery as an evil, and the slave-trade as a heinous crime, but that they set their faces like a flint against it. The traffic in slaves began among the colonists in the winter of 1645-6, and in the following November the court placed on record this outspoken denunciation of the practice: "The Gen'all Co'te conceiving themselves bound by y'e first opertunity to bear Witness against y'e haynos & crying sin of man stealing, as also to prscribe such timely redresse for what is past, and such a law for y'e future as may sufficiently deter all others belonging to us to have to do in such vile and odious courses, iustly abhored of all good and iust men, do order y't y'e negro interpreter w'th others unlawfully taken, be y'e first opertunity (at y'e charge of y'e country for psent), sent to his native country in Ginny, & a letter w'th him of y'e indignation of y'e Corte thereabout, and iustice hereof, desiring o'r hono'red Gov'rnr would please put this order in execution." How men so clear in their convictions of the rights of Africans could be guilty of the most heartless injustice to Quakers and their friends, it is not easy to explain; and yet they mercilessly persecuted one of their own fellow-citizens, Nicholas Upsall, and made him an exile from his home, for no greater crime than that of countenancing and befriending members of the Society of Friends. He kept the Dorchester hostelry, and was wont to entertain Quakers as he did any other decent people; but for this he was apprehended and tried by the court, and sentenced to pay a fine of L20 and be thrown into prison. Finally, finding it impossible to entirely prevent his friends from holding intercourse with him, he was banished from the settlement for the remainder of his life. That curious book, "Persecutors Maul'd with their own Weapons," contains the following account of the case: