Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/264

252 what 1880 will bring to pass. He must be a bold man who declares to the nation that no new political machinery shall be introduced, in the next thirty years, to our national mill. We know not what a day shall bring forth, but we know that God is on the side of right and justice, and that they will prevail so long as God is God.

Now, then, to let alone details, and generalize into one all the causes of our condition, this is the result : we have found welfare just so far as we have followed the democratic idea, and enacted justice into law. We have lost welfare just so far as we have followed the despotic idea, and made iniquity into a statute. So far as we have re-affirmed the ordinance of nature and re-enacted the will of God, we have succeeded. So far as we have refused to do that, we have failed. Of old it was written, " Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people."

And now a word of our dangers. There seems no danger from abroad; from any foreign State, unless we begin the quarrel; none from famine. The real danger, in one word, is this—That we shall try to enact injustice into a law, and with the force of the nation to make iniquity obeyed.

See some of the special forms of injustice which threaten us, or are already here. I shall put them into the form of ideas.

1. One, common among politicians, is, that the State is for a portion of the people, not the whole. Thus it has been declared that the Constitution of the United States did not recognise the three million slaves as citizens, or extend to them any right which it guarantees to other men. It would be a sad thing for the State to declare there was a single child in the whole land to whom it owed no protection. What, then, if it attempts to take three millions from under its shield ? In obedience to this false idea, the counsel has been given, that we must abstain from all "Political agitation" of the most important matter before the people. We must leave that to our masters, for the State is for them, it is not for you and me. They must say whether we shall "agitate" and