Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/252

240 five thousand more girls and boys at school than large South Carolina. The State of Ohio alone has more than seventeen thousand children at school beyond what the whole fifteen slave States can boast. The permanent literature of the nation all comes from the North ; your historians are from that quarter — your Sparkses, your Bancrofts, your Hildreths, and Prescotts, and Ticknors ; the poets are from the same quarter—your Whittiers and Longfellows, and Lowells, and Bryants; the men of literature and religion—your Channings, and Irvings, and Emersons—are from the same quarter! Preaching—it is everywhere, and sermons are as thick almost as autumnal leaves; but who ever heard of a great or famous clergyman in a Southern State? of a great and famous sermon that rang through the nation from that quarter? No man. Your Edwards of old time, and your Beechers, old and young, your Channing and Buckminster, and the rest, which throng to every man^s lips—all are from the North. Nature has done enough for the South; Goi's cup of blessing runs over—and yet you see the result! But there has been no pestilence at the South more than at the North; no earthquake has torn the ground beneath their feet; no war has come to disturb them more than us. The government has never laid a withering hand on their commerce, their agriculture, their schools and colleges, their literature and their church.

Still, letting alone the South and the North as such, not considering either exclusively, we are one nation. What is a nation? It is one of the great parties in the world. It is a sectional party, having geographical limits ; with a party organization, party opinions, party mottoes, party machinery, party leaders, and party followers ; with some capital city for its party head-quarters. There has been an Assyrian party, a British, a Persian, an Egyptian, and a Roman party; there is now a Chinese party, and a Russian, a Turkish, a French, and an English party; these are also called nations. We belong to the American party, and that includes the North as well as the South; and so all are brothers of the same party, differing amongst ourselves—but from other nations in this, that we are the American party, and not the Russian nor the English.

We ought to look at the whole American party, the