Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/222

210 of an accident succeeds him in the presidential chair : only the man, not the officer, goes home to God, with what of goodness and piety he had won. His manhood is all that he can carry out of the world; elected or rejected, a conqueror or conquered, it is now the same to him ; and it may be the humblest female slave who only earned the bread which her master only ate, and got an enforced concubinage for pay, takes rank in heaven far before the man whom the nation honoured with its highest trust, and for whom the official Senate and low-browed Church send out their hollow groans.

If he could speak to us from his present position, methinks he would say: Countrymen and friends! You see how little it availed you to agitate the land and put a little man in a great place. It is not the hurrah of parties that will "save the Union," it is not "great men." It is only Justice. Remember that Atheism is not the first principle of a Republic; remember there is a law of God, the higher law of the universe, the Everlasting Right; I thought so once, and now I know it. Remember that you are accountable to God for all things ; that you owe justice