Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/304

292 Be not surprised at this attack on Mr. Sumner. It is no strange thing. It is the result of a long series of acts, each the child of its predecessor, and father of what followed, not exceptional, but instantial, in our history. Look with a little patience after the Cause of those outrages at Kansas and at Washington. You will not agree with me to-day; I cannot convince four thousand men, and carry them quite so far, all at once. Think of my words when you go home.

Look first at the obvious cause of the blows dealt that fair senatorial head by the Hon. Mr. Brooks, of South Carolina. It is the ferocious Disposition of the Slaveholder. I know the cruelty of that despotism only too well, and am not thought very sparing of my words. You know what I utter; God, what I withhold. Much, both of fact and feeling, I have always kept in reserve, and still keep it. What I give is quite as much as any audience can carry or will take.

This ferocious despotism has determined on two things:

First, Slavery shall spread all over the land, into the Territories, into the (so-called) free States.

Second, Freedom of speech against it shall not be allowed anywhere in the Territories, in the free States, or in the Capitol, any more than in South Carolina.

Proof of each is only too plentiful and plain. As a sign of the times, look at a single straw in the stream of slavery: it is a poison-weed in a muddy, fetid stream, but it shows which way its pestilential waters run. A few days since, a man, holding an important office under the United States Government in Boston, told one of my friends, "It won't be three years before a man will be punished for talking Nigger (speaking against slavery) in Boston, as surely as he now is in Charleston, S.C." This "unterrified democrat" has now gone to the Cincinnati Convention, whereof he is a worthy member, to organize means to attain that end. I shall not tell you his name,—that is hateful enough already; but turn your wrath against the ferocious despotism which uses him to bark and bite.

That is the obvious cause, the cause initiative, of which I have much more to tell, only not now.

Look next at the Secondary Causes, not quite so plain, but as fertile in results.

The North allows the South to steal black men, and men