Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/76

64 of treasure and this waste of blood is only a proof of weakness. War is a transient weakness of the nation, but slavery a permanent imbecility.

What falsehood has this war produced in the executive and legislative power; in both parties, whigs and democrats! I always thought that here in Massachusetts the whigs were the most to blame; they tried to put the disgrace of the war on the others, while the democratic party coolly faced the wickedness. Did far-sighted men know that there would be a war on Mexico, or else on the tariff or the currency, and prefer the first as the least evil?

See to what the war has driven two of the most famous men of the nation: one wished to "capture or slay a Mexican;" the other could encourage the volunteers to fight a war which he had denounced as needless, "a war of pretexts," and place the men of Monterey before the men of Bunker Hill; each could invest a son in that unholy cause. You know the rest: the fathers ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge. When a man goes on board an emigrant ship, reeking with filth and fever, not for gain, not for "glory," but in brotherly love, catches the contagion, and dies a martyr to his heroic benevolence, men speak of it in corners, and it is soon forgot; there is no parade in the streets; society takes little pains to do honour to the man. How rarely is a pension given to his widow or his child; only once in the whole land, and then but a small sum. But when a volunteer officer—for of the humbler and more excusable men that fall we take no heed, war may mow that crop of "vulgar deaths" with what scythe he will—falls or dies in the quarrel which he had no concern in, falls in a broil between the two nations, your newspapers extol the man, and with martial pomp, "sonorous metal blowing martial sounds," with all the honours of the most honoured dead, you lay away his body in the tomb. Thus is it that the nation teaches these little ones that it is better to kill than to make alive.

I know there are men in the army, honourable and