Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/275

Rh If it destroys these rights, he spurns it with his feet. Is here no lesson ? Look further, then.

Do you know how empires find their end? Yes, the great States eat up the little. As with fish, so with nations. Ay, but how do the great States come to an end? By their own injustice, and no other cause. They would make unrighteousness their law, and God wills not that it be so. Thus they fall; thus they die. Look at these ancient States, the queenliest queens of earth. There is Rome, the widow of two civilizations,—the Pagan and the Catholic. They both had her, and unto both she bore daughters and fair sons. But, the Mobe of Nations, she boasted that her children were holier and more fair than all the pure ideas of justice, truth, and love, the offspring of the eternal God. And now she sits there, transformed into stone, amid the ruins of her children's bones. At midnight I have heard the owl hoot in the coliseum and the forum, giving voice to desolation; and at midday I have seen the fox in the palace where Augustus gathered the wealth, the wit, the beauty, and the wisdom of a conquered world; and the fox and the owl interpreted to me the voice of many ages, which came to tell this age, that though hand joined in hand, the wicked shall not prosper.

Come with me, my friends, a moment more, pass over this Golgotha of human history, treading reverent as you go, for our feet are on our mothers' grave, and our shoes defile our fathers' hallowed bones. Let us not talk of them ; go further on, look and pass by. Come with me into the Inferno of the nations, with such poor guidance as my lamp can lend. Let us disquiet and bring up the awful shadows of empires buried long ago, and learn a lesson from the tomb.

Come, old Assyria, with the Ninevitish dove upon thy emerald crown! What laid thee low? "I fell by own injustice. Thereby Nineveh and Babylon came, with me, also, to the ground."

Oh, queenly Persia, flame of the nations, wherefore art thou so fallen, who troddest the people under thee, bridgedst the Hellespont with ships, and pouredst thy temple-wasting millions on the western world? "Because I trod the people under me, and bridged the Hellespont