Respectability

The Jury that has been summoned on occasion of the Christiana trials, 'was never before equalled for respectability.' Just the thing that was wanted. Hanging men for treason, because they defend their liberties, has been rather disreputable business in this country, since the time when Adams and Hancock, and Franklin and Jefferson, managed to escape the noose. But now it seems necessary that this public sentiment should be revolutionized. And since we have traveled back some centuries, and adopted the then popular definition of treason, it follows that the strangling which was then popular for the crime, should be equally so now. Since we have adopted the treason code of their Imperial Majesties of Russia and Austria, it should also become quite as reputable to shoot and choke the abolitionists, as it has been for the Europeans to amuse themselves in a like manner with Poles and Hungarians. And pray, how could this be better done than by making 'Ex-Senators, honorable Judges, and rich Bankers,' hangmen in the case?
Fillmore and Grier are evidently wise in their generation. Hanging by the rabble, under the authority of the Lynch code, at the South, has never seemed to take well at the North. But now when wealth and station shall give it character, we may look for a change in this particular. Men will be as ambitious to become hangmen, as they are now to be slaveholders; it will be the grand passport to office and power. Indeed, now, the same rope that shall hang the Christiana victims, is the very one on which Fillmore's hope for a re-election is suspended. The South, which has the entire monopoly of President - making in this country, has made this the condition. And if Fillmore shall vigorously and successfully prosecute to this job, till the stiffened forms of these thirty friends of freedom shall be consigned to the surgeons for dissection! he will be reinstated in the Presidential chair. Not by 'visitation of Providence, but by deliberate intent of our oligarchy - an oligarchy that sticks at no means for the continued enslavement of the millions in this country.
Respectable! There is deep trickery in this. They would have us believe, that respectability is evidence that impartial justice shall be done. Who so respectable as slave-holders? Senators and Judges, who pass and execute laws for slave-catching, are the very pinks of respectability. And so over-powering is the respectability of this very hangman - Fillmore - that when he went to Boston, the other day, Democrats joined with cotton Whigs in conferring upon him the highest honors. Chas. Sumner paid him a visit of ceremony, and Gen. Wilson suspended his denunciations of the Fugitive Slave Law, to escort him before the people, that he might receive the homage due to his respectability.

Of all men possessing ordinary human capacities, these respectables are the very ones who should be excluded from the Jury for incompetency. These Judges and ex-Senators have their only hope of preferment in Fillmore's success against the lives or liberties of these citizens. The commercial and moneyed monopolists, as we all know, are directly interested, and have staked all upon this slave-catching issue. This conspiracy is not alone against those thirty fellow-citizens, immured in the Philadelphia prison. It is a conspiracy against all freemen. A conspiracy the more to be dreaded, because it is a conspiracy of power and 'respectability.' - A conspiracy that confidently relies upon its respectability to look out of countenance all opposition to slave-catching. Shall it be successful? It will be, if we prefer, as heretofore, to do homage to respectability, rather than to justice. - Ohio Bugle.