Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/133

Rh spoke of the sin—for all true reforms are bottomed on religion, and while they seem adverse to many interests, yet represent the idea of the Eternal. He found a few others, a very few, and began the anti-slavery movement. The "platform" of the new party was not an interest, but an idea—that "All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unaKlinable rights." Every truth is also a fact; this was a fact of human consciousness, and a truth of necessity. The time has not come to write the history of the abolitionists,—other deeds must come before words ; but we cannot forbear quoting the testimony of one witness, as to the state of anti-slavery feeling in New England in 1831. It is the late Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, a former mayor of Boston, who speaks in his recent letter.

Such was the state of things in 1831. Anti-slavery had "an obscure hole" for its head-quarters; the one agitator, who had filled the two doughty Grovernors of Virginia and Georgia with uncomfortable forebodings, had a "negro boy" "for his only visible auxiliary," and none of the respectable men of Boston had heard of the hole, of the agitator, of the negro boy, or even of the agitation. One thing must be true: either the man and the boy were pretty vigorous, or else there was a great truth in that obscure hole; for, in spite of the governors and the mayors, spite of the many able men in the South and the North, spite, also, of the wealth and respectability of the whole land, it is a plain case that the abolitionists have shaken the nation, and their idea is the idea of the time; and the party which shall warmly welcome that is destined before long to override all the other parties.