Subterfuge

“ Such trials, such sufferings, and all so nobly borne! Then such escapes, such disguises, such subterfuges, and all so cleverly planned and carried out! Been in prison—got out of it, of course! Been thrown into a canal—swam ashore! Stole a horse—sold him for a large sum of money! ”

“ It has been buried deep and ever deeper beneath the accruing refinements of humanity, and forced to find dwarfed expression in the subterfuges with which the civilized woman evades and refuses her wooer, that finally she may make pretense of her unwilling capture. ”

“ To conceal from themselves the fundamental heterogeneity of all this civilised morality, they have recourse to a great number of subterfuges, sometimes relegating to the rank of exceptions, importations, or survivals, everything which embarrasses them—sometimes drowning reality in an ocean of vague phrases and, most often, employing both methods the better to obscure the problem. ”

“ If the authorities attempt to elicit the facts by a course of examination, they only obtain subterfuges and prevarications, and seek in vain by threats or promises to shake the constancy of the witnesses. ”

“ They are not always, by any means, the most corrupt, and often when I learn, from a police report, that a fugitive is following regular work, I ask the Minister (of Justice) to suspend the order for his recapture.
"From the standpoint of the general security of the establishment, the facility of escape constitutes a valuable safety valve, which it is expedient to recognise. In truth, the latent energies which impel a man, at all costs, to seek emancipation from the bondage which he has to endure in the Beggars' Depot are exhausted by flight. ”

“ But I return to the shutting up of Hones.
As several People, I say, got out of their Houses by Stratagem, after they were shut up, so others got out by bribing the Watchmen, and giving them Money to let them go privately out in the Night. I must confess, I thought it at that time, the most innocent Corruption, or Bribery, that any Man could be guilty of; and therefore could not but pity the poor Men, and think it was hard when three of those Watchmen, were publickly whipt thro' the Streets, for suffering People to go out of Houses shut up. ”

“ Whenever a scaffold is erected outside a prison-door, if you are earnest in pursuit of truth, and can put up with disgusting objects, you shall see a relic of ancient manners hanged.
“There still exist, in parts of America, rivers on whose banks are earnest men who shall take your scalp, the wife's of your bosom, and the innocent child's of her bosom. ”

“ Plot in the Prison rises, by Citoyen Laflotte and Preternatural Suspicion. Suspicious Municipality snatches from us all implements; all money and possession, of means or metal, is ruthlessly searched for, in pocket, in pillow and paillasse, and snatched away; red-capped Commissaries entering every cell! Indignation, temporary desperation, at robbery of its very thimble, fills the gentle heart. Old Nuns shriek shrill discord; demand to be killed forthwith. ”

“ My house is beset every night by a most determined murderous mob; and we guard her every moment. We think if we can place her where we wish to, she will be safe. I shall defend her and her reputation at the risk of my fortune and my life. ”

“ Nothing could be more salutary than the purposes of these regulations. The suburbs of the metropolis abounded with an incredible number of public houses, which continually resounded with the noise of riot and intemperance; they were the haunts of idleness, fraud, and rapine; and the seminaries of drunkenness, debauchery, extravagance, and every vice incident to human nature; yet the suppression of these receptacles of infamy was attended with an inconvenience, which, in some cases, arose even to a degree of oppression. ”

“ The mob, which had begun by attacking dissenters as public enemies, burning down their chapels and their houses, and making spoil of their goods, soon expanded their views, and gave unmistakable signs that the distinction between dissenter and churchman had had its hour, and was to be superseded in favour of the doctrine now so well known, ‘La propriété, c’est un vol.’ When matters came to this pass the magistrates swore-in special constables. ”

“ I would say this; if upon the bare supposal of a poor creature being represented by a spectre, too great a progress be made by the authority in ruining a poor neighbor so represented, it may be that a door may be thereby opened for the Devils to obtain from the Courts in the invisible world a license to proceed unto most hideous desolations upon the repute and repose of such as have yet been kept from the great transgression. If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of diabolical representations, the door is opened! ”

“ But, as soon as you pass the gate, you perceive you are in the centre of a corrupt city. The court-yards are filled with dirty beggars, worn to the bones by misery, playing cards, quarrelling, or asleep on the ground, waiting for the alms the priests give them. ”

“ Only to stand for a moment, free, on the barricade, outlawed and joyous, with Death, Freedom's impregnable citadel, opening its gates behind—and to pass through, the red flag uplifted in the sight of all men, with flaming slums and smoking wrongs for one's funereal pyre! ”

“ II. THE TWO CABS AND THE OVEN. IT falls, I think, to few people to suffer so huge a revolution in life as I had experienced. Here was I—partly, no doubt, as you will justly urge, by my own precipitate acts—an outlaw, a pariah from society, a fugitive from justice. ”

“ Citizens cast into dungeons without charges of crime against them, and without the formalities of a trial by a jury, private property confiscated at the beck of those in power, the press humbled, muzzled, and suppressed, or prostituted to serve the ends of tyranny! ”

“ Everywhere in the streets the machines of justice were visible-pillories for the neck and hands, stocks for the feet, and chains to stretch across, in case of need, and stop a mob. In the suburbs were oak cages for nocturnal offenders. At the church doors might now and then be seen women enveloped in sheets, doing penance for their evil deeds. ”

“ I might exhibit abuses which have occurred under the Fugitive Act,—the number of free persons it has doomed to Slavery, the riots it has provoked, the brutal conduct of its officers, the distress it has scattered, the derangement of business it has caused,—interfering even with the administration of justice, changing courthouses into barracks and barracoons, and filling streets with armed men, amidst which law is silent. ”

“ Who were these dangerous and desperate men whose mere proposal to meet and organize themselves for a purpose which was plainly declared, and which was to be sought by legal methods only, had so profoundly disturbed the city and startled the press into sounding a furious alarm? ”

“ In nearly every settlement suspicion led to combination for defense, combination to some form of oppression or insult, and so on by easy transition to arrest and concealment, attack and reprisal, expulsion, theft, house- burning, capture, and murder. ”

“ And then began the heart-sickening begging expeditions to the houses of local magnates and wealthy residents in the town; the timid pulling of front-door bells, and scraping of feet on strangers' door-mats; the long, anxious waiting in shadowy halls and ante-rooms; the sitting down on the extreme edges of chairs; the sighing, stammering petitions, accompanied by wiping of eyes, meant to be sincere yet sounding all the time hypocritically mercenary, and failing to make the intended impression. ”

“ They are minutely acquainted with every possible hiding hole, especially those that are underground, because from these it is easier to burrow the tunnels that will take them beyond the walls and to liberty. ”

“ The events of the day confirmed him in the doctrine that every disorganised mob is more likely to behave in the spirit of the lowest and most contemptible units than in the spirit of what is highest in them. ”

“ The fugitive from labor, on the other hand, is delivered up as a chattel, to the absolute control of his claimant, to be taken where he wills, subject to his selfish passions, and all his irresponsible power. ”

“ Therefore attack this great stronghold which for the past thirty years has warred and is warring against our social manhood and womanhood, and constantly undermining the moral life of the nation; against this citadel of licentiousness, this metropolitan centre of crime, and vice, and sin, direct your full blast of righteous and manly indignation. ”

“ The gate banging behind her, the high spiked wall and the barred windows in the side of the courthouse building so near her, all these things of a sudden spelled menace, a threat direct against her. The spirit of outlawry that had grown within her these past few days of tumbled incidents was potent to make her believe the law's eyes could read outlawry on her features. ”

“ But strip it of its towers, fill up the fosse, unbarricade the doors, call it simply a confinement, and suppose ’tis some tyrant of a distemper, and not of a man, which holds you in it, the evil vanishes and you bear the other half without complaint. ”

“ And because when he was taken and led to prison by the bedels of the University, he entered his house and shut his coffers and chests and the door of his room for the safety of his goods and chattels, the said Chancellor banished him out of the town, and had it proclaimed everywhere, as though he were an outlaw, and sequestered all his goods and chattels, threatening if he entered the town to imprison him again for six days. No one ever had such franchise or power thus to outlaw, destroy, and banish the King's burgesses in the said town. Prays a remedy for charity. ”

“ Can it be thought strange that the disappearance week by week and month by month of valuable slaves over the unknown routes of the underground system should have produced wrath, suspicion and hostility in the minds of people who could justly claim to have a constitutional guarantee, the laws of Congress, and the decisions of the highest courts on their side? ”

“ At every one of the gates of the city the mob halt and command their victim to climb up the ladder and peer over the walls to see if the kings are anywhere in sight.
Sometimes when he reaches the top the poor wretch is allowed to fall, at the risk of a cracked head or a broken limb. If he escapes all dangers, he is led on from gate to gate until his patience or his faith is exhausted. ”

“ Those in position to see it best stirred not from their post, but faced the fatal cross-tree, the motionless ropes, the empty platform, with an untiring, insatiable gaze, that seemed pregnant with some terrible meaning, while the mob behind them struggled, and pushed, and raved, and fought ”

“ I rely greatly on your sagacity and on the vigilance of your servants, count. Let them watch the stupid populace—see to it that faux freres always attend the meetings of my enemies, and whenever they inform you of conspiracies against myself, why, the malefactors shall be spirited away without any superfluous noise. Thank God, we have fortresses and state prisons, with walls too thick for shrieks or groans to penetrate, and that no one is able to break through. The public should learn as little as possible of the fate of these criminals. ”

“ Some feeble fellow creatures there are, who like the captives in the dungeon, dread the light; these are betrayed by their fears to join with the mitred and crowned robbers that suppress with calumny all reformers and with a verdict of sedition give them up, bound as victims, to these legal depredators, and perpetuate, unwittingly, their own ignorance and misery. ”

“ The matter-of-fact manner in which the outlaw, who was, even as he spoke, being hunted by hundreds of men, talked of eluding his pursuers and fulfilling his promise, gave the scouts an idea of his absolute fearlessness which they could not but admire, while at the same time his contempt for the Service galled them. ”

“ When threatened by foreign invaders or by popular uprisings and official rebellion at home, the Court—a motley crowd or mob, of King, palace officials, eunuchs, concubines, blind men, sorceresses, and other similar retainers of the palace—has, as a rule, precipitately fled to some place of refuge, deserted by efficient military escort and in most miserable plight. ”

“ A large portion of what he is accustomed to see presents itself to him in the character of boundary and prohibition; on every hand there is something to warn him what he must not do. There are high walls, and gates, and fences, and brinks of torrents and precipices ”

“ Servants betrayed their masters, one citizen became a spy upon his neighbour, and arrests and confiscations so multiplied, that the courts found a difficulty in getting through the immense increase of business thus occasioned. ”

“ That such infamy should be tolerated in a town is a piece of barbarity and iniquity, all the more as it could easily be remedied by a police-notice to the effect that every lash shall have a knot at the end of it. ”

“ Now we know the whole shameful story: how as that one man stood alone, on his way to claim his right, alone so that he could do no violence, fourteen men, said the Central News, police and ushers, flung themselves upon him, pushed and pulled him down the stairs, smashing in their violence the glass and wood of the passage door ”

“ They patroled the streets: they were loud in the expressions of their dissatisfaction. With the inconsequence incident to the lower orders of mankind, they threatened to destroy the mills, the markets, the places of sale, the means and materials by which their wants were to be supplied.
In the midst of these scenes of tumult and confusion, it is not to be imagined that I escaped uncensured. Far otherwise: in proportion to the gratitude and adoration with which they had lately regarded me, were their detestation and abhorrence now. My interference was spoken of with contempt and execration. ”

“ Resolved, That we regard the acts of all mobs as flagrant violations of law, and those who compose them individually responsible, both to the laws of God and man, for every depredation committed upon the property, rights, or life of any citizen. ”