Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/189

Rh New England must have remembered the twenty-fifth September, and have lived over again each year the annual treason of his heart!

It is well for men to pause on such days, the anniversary of their crime, and see the letters which sin has branded in their consciousness come out anew, and burn, even in the scars they left behind. In sadness, in penitence, in prayers of resolution, should a man mark these days in his own sad calendar. They are times for a man to retire within himself, to seek communion with his God, and cleanse him of the elephantine leprosy his sin has brought upon his soul. There are such days in the life of a nation, when it stains its own integrity, commits treason against mankind, and sin against the most high God; when a proud king, or wicked minister,—his rare power consorting with a vulgar aim,—misled the people’s heart, abused the nation's strength, organized iniquity as law, condensing a world of wicked will into a single wicked deed, and wrought some hideous Bartholomew massacre in the face of the sun. The anniversary of such events is a day of horror and of shivering to mankind; a day of sorrow to the guilty State which pricks with shame at the anniversary of the deed. The twelfth of April is such a day for Boston and this State. It is the first anniversary of a great crime,—a crime against the majesty of Massachusetts law, and the dignity of the Constitution of the United States: of a great wrong,—a wrong against you and me, and all of us, against the babe not born, against the nature of mankind; of a great sin,—a sin against the law God wrote in human nature, a sin against the Infinite God. It was a great crime, a great wrong, a great sin, on the side of American Government, which did the deed: on the people's part it was a great defeat; your defeat and mine.

Out of the iron house of bondage, a man, guilty of no crime but love of liberty, fled to the people of Massachusetts. He came to us a wanderer, and Boston took him in to an unlawful jail; hungry, and she fed him with a felon's meat; thirsty, she gave him the gall and vinegar of a slave to drink; naked, she clothed him with chains; sick and in prison, he cried for a helper, and Boston sent him a marshal and a commissioner; she set him between kid-