He, too,
preached, in season and out of season, the gospel of Nationality. JOSEPH
HODGES CHOATE.
From "Oration on Rufus Choate."
* * * * *
I leave these fellows and turn for a moment to their victims. And I
would here, without any reference to my own case, earnestly implore that
sympathy with political sufferers should not be merely telescopic in its
character, "distance lending enchantment to the view"; and that
when your statesmen sentimentalize upon, and your journalists denounce,
far-away tyrannies--the horrors of Neapolitan dungeons--the abridgment
of personal freedom in continental countries--the exercise of arbitrary
power by irresponsible authority in other lands--they would turn their
eyes homeward and examine the treatment and the sufferings of their own
political prisoners. I would in all sincerity suggest that humane and
well-meaning men who exert themselves for the remission of the
death-penalty as a mercy would rather implore that the doom of solitary
and silent captivity should be remitted to the more merciful doom of an
immediate relief from suffering by immediate execution--the opportunity
of an immediate appeal from man's cruelty to God's justice.
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