3 December 1860 – 9 December 1860

The first snow, four or five inches, this evening. Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone. It exists in the Northern States, and I am reminded by what I find in the newspapers that it exists in Canada. I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black man only because he is a more valuable slave. It appears that a colored man killed his would-be kidnapper in Missouri and fled to Canada. The blood- hounds have tracked him to Toronto and now demand him of her judges. From all that I can learn, they are playing their parts like judges. They are servile, while the poor fugitive in their jail is free in spirit at least. This is what a Canadian writes to the New York Tribune : “Our judges may be compelled to render a judgment adverse to the prisoner. Depend upon it, they will not do it unless compelled [his italics}].1 And then the poor fellow will be taken back, and probably burned to death by the brutes of the South.” Com- pelled! By whom? Does God compel them? or is it some other master whom they serve ? Can’t they hold out a little longer against the tremendous pressure? If they are fairly represented, I would n’t trust their courage to defend a setting hen of mine against a weasel. Will this excuse avail them when the real day of judgment comes ? They have not to fear the slightest bodily harm: no one stands over them with a stick or a knife even [ ?]. They have at the worst only to resign their places and not a mouse will squeak about it. And yet they are likely to assist in tying this victim to the stake! Would that his example might teach them to break their own fet- ters! They appear not to know what kind of justice that is which is to be done though the heavens fall. Better that the British Empire be destroyed than that it should help to reénslave this man! This correspondent suggests that the “good people” of New York may rescue him as he is being carried back. ‘There, then, is the only resort of justice, — not where the judges are, but where the mob is, where human hearts are beating, and hands move in obedience to their impulses. Perhaps his fellow-fugitives in Toronto may not feel compelled to surrender him. Justice, departing from the Canadian soil, leaves her last traces among these. What is called the religious world very generally deny virtue to all who have not received the Gospel. They accept no god as genuine but the one that bears a Hebrew name. The Greenlander’s Pirksoma [?] (he that is above), or any the like, is always the name of a false god to them. C. says that Walden was first frozen over on the 16th December.