The Hillsborough Recorder

There is a Crude Wrong somewhere, and it falls with peculiar weight upon the innocent on every side. Men talk of their liberty as above all price and they are throwing it away, and stripping others of it day by day. They groan above taxes, and they tax themselves and the whole community enormously year after year, or suffer dealers and drinkers to tax them, for the consumption of that which they do not need, and which brings ruin to their revenue, their charities, and all their resources, a burden to which every other is light. We pay largely, and resign no little of our freedom for the protection which government extends over our property and lives. But when we implore rulers or citizens to protect us and our children from the decoys and pitfalls that are thick spread around us, or help us to match our brother from the merciless fangs of a monster in human shape, they tell us they cannot interfere with a man's business, they will not curtail his liberty, they must not hazard an election, they dare not enforce an unpopular law: and so they dig another pitfall at our very door, and multiply the lures all along our streets, and extend over them that same defence which they refuse us and ours! O, it is miserable mockery. It is black sophistry. It is dreadful inhumanity. Where peculiarly the guilt lies, or what is the remedy, it is for others and all to consider. That there is guilt, every conscience that is alive feels. That there must be a remedy, every believer in God and Christianity knows.