They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.

These lines come from James Russell Lowell’s abolitionist poem “Stanzas for Freedom,” written in the early 1840s amid intense public controversy over slavery in the United States. Lowell, a New England poet and editor, was then closely associated with antislavery activism and the moral-reform culture of Boston and Cambridge. The poem addresses the pressures of conformity and the social cost of dissent, especially for those who opposed slavery when that position was unpopular or dangerous. The couplet crystallizes Lowell’s belief that moral courage often requires standing with a small minority—“two or three”—against the comfort and coercion of the crowd.

Lowell equates fear of social isolation with a kind of bondage: people who cannot risk being right in a small minority are “slaves” to public opinion. The phrase “in the right with two or three” emphasizes that truth and justice are not determined by numbers; they may be upheld by only a handful of principled individuals. The couplet thus praises moral independence and condemns cowardly conformity. In the poem’s antislavery setting, the lines also imply that neutrality or silence in the face of injustice is itself a form of capitulation—an internal enslavement to comfort, reputation, or prevailing power.