Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/137

Rh New Hampshire, Yermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, and have created a vast amount of property, worth more than all the slave States put together! Then the North must deliver up the fugitive slaves, and Ohio must play the traitor, the kidnapper, the bloodhound, for Kentucky! The South wanted to make two slave States out of Florida, and will out of Texas; she makes slavery perpetual in both; she is always bragging as if she made the Revolution, while she only laid the Embargo, and began the late war with England,—but that is going further back than is needful. The South imprisons our coloured sailors in her ports, contrary to justice, and even contrary to the Constitution. She drove our commissioners out of South Carolina and Louisiana, when they were sent to look into the matter and legally seek for redress. She affronts the world with a most odious despotism, and tried to make the English return her runaway slaves, making the nation a reproach before the world; she insists on kidnapping men even in Boston; she declares that we shall not abolish slavery in the capital of the Union; that she will extend it in spite of us from sea to sea. She annexed Texas for a slave-pasture, and then made the Mexican war to enlarge that pasture, but the North must pay for it; she treads the Constitution under her feet, the North under her feet, justice and the unalienable rights of man under her feet.

The North has charged all these items and many more; now they are brought up for settlement, and, if not can- celled, will not be forgot till the Muse of History gives up the ghost; some Northern men have the American sentiment, and the American idea, put the man before the dollar, counting man the substance, property the accident. The sentiment and idea of liberty are bottomed on Christianity, as that on human nature; they are quite sure to prevail; the spirit of the nation is on their side—the spirit of the age and the everlasting right.

It is instructive to see how the political parties have hitherto kept clear of anti-slavery. It is "no part of the whig doctrine;" the democrats abhor it. Mr. Webster, it is true, once claimed the Wilmot Proviso as his thunder, but he cannot wield it, and so it slips out of his hands, and runs round to the chair of his brother senator from New