Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/81

Rh tensive plans are now advanced by the righteousness and now by the wrath of man; He who stilleth the waves of the sea and the tumult of the people, will turn all this wickedness to account in the history of man—of that I have no doubt. But that is no excuse for American crime. A greater good lay within our grasp, and we spurned it away.

Well, before long the soldiers will come back, such as shall ever come—the regulars and volunteers, the husbands of the women whom your charity fed last winter, housed and clad and warmed. They will come back. Come, New England, with your posterity of States, go forth to meet your sons returning all " covered with imperishable honours." Come, men, to meet your fathers, brothers. Come, women, to your husbands and your lovers; come. But what! is that the body of men who a year or two ago went forth so full of valour and of rum? Are these rags the imperishable honours that cover them? Here is not half the whole. Where is the wealth they hoped from the spoil of churches? But the men—"Where is my husband?" says one; "And my son?" says another. "They fell at Jalapa, one, and one at Cerro Gordo; but they fell covered with imperishable honour, for 'twas a famous victory." "Where is my lover?" screams a woman whom anguish makes respectable, spite of her filth and ignorance;—"And our father, where is he?" scream a troop of half-starved children, staring through their dirt and rags. "One died of the vomit at Yera Cruz. Your father, little ones, we scourged the naked man to death at Mixcoae."

But that troop which is left, who are in the arms of wife and child, they are the best sermon against war; this has lost an arm and that a leg; half are maimed in battle or sickened with the fever; all polluted with the drunkenness, idleness, debauchery, lust, and murder of a camp. Strip off this man's coat, and count the stripes welted into his flesh, stripes laid on by demagogues that love the people—"the dear people!" See how affectionately the war-makers branded the "dear soldiers" with a letter D, with a red-hot iron, in the cheek. The flesh will quiver as the irons burn; no matter: it is only for love of the people that all this is done, and we are all of us covered