Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/259

Rh the earth and sea from escaping, or the rivers of New England from running up hill.

This is not quite all! I have just now tried to hint at the causes of the difference in the condition of the people, North and South. Now let me show the cause of the agitation and alarm. We begin with a sentiment ; that spreads to an idea; the idea grows to an act, to an institution; then it has done its work. Men seek to spread their sentiments and ideas. The democratic idea tries to spread ; the despotic idea tries to spread. For a long time the nation held these two ideas in its bosom, not fully conscious of either of them. Both came here in a state of infancy, so to say, with our fathers; the democratic idea very dimly understood; the despotic idea not fully carried out, yet it did a great mischief in the State and church. In the Declaration of Independence, writ by a young man, only the democratic idea appears, and that idea never got so distinctly stated before. But mark you, and see the confusion in men's minds. That democratic idea was thus distinctly stated by a man who was a slaveholder almost all his life; and Unless public rumour has been unusually false, he has left some of his own offspring under the influence of the despotic and not the democratic idea; slaves and not free men.

In the Constitution of the United States these two ideas appear. It was thought for a long time they were not incompatible; it was thought the great American party might recognise both, and a compromise was made between the two. It was thought each might go about its own work and let the other alone; that the hawk and the hen might dwell happily together in the same coop, each lay her own eggs, and rear her own brood, and neither put a claw upon the other.

In the meantime each founded institutions after its kind; in the Northern States, democratic institutions; in the Southern, aristocratic. What once lay latent in the mind of the nation has now become patent. The thinking part of the nation sees the difference between the two. Some men are beginning to see that the two are completely incompatible, and cannot be good friends. Others are asking us to shut our eyes and not see it, and they think that so