Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/262

250 in the green soil of America, and surrounded by the old institutions of the middle ages. Slavery is the one idea of the Spanish tribes—here African, there Indian or Caucasian.

One hundred and thirty years after Genoese Columbus had planted the Spanish Cross in the new world—"sword in hand and splendidly arrayed,"—from a little vessel, leaky, and with a "wrack in the main beam amidships," the Anglo-Saxons dropped their anchor in Massachusetts bay, circled then with savage woods; they drew up a "compact," chose their "Governor" for one year; rested and worshipped on Sunday; the next day landed at "New Plymouth," thanking God. They came, a slip from a young tree full of hardy life. Four stout roots—Angle, Saxon, Danish, Norman—united their old fantastic twists and joined in this one tough and rugged stem, then quadruply buttressed below, now how widely branched abroad in every climate of the world! Fresh blood was in those Anglo-Saxon veins; strong, red, heathen blood, not long before inoculated with Christianity which yet took most kindly in all Teutonic veins.

These pilgrims had in them the ethnologic idiosyncrasy of the Anglo-Saxon—his restless disposition to invade and conquer other lands; his haughty contempt of humbler tribes, which leads him to subvert, enslave, kill, and exterminate; his fondness for material things, preferring use to beauty; his love of personal liberty, yet coupled with most profound respect for peaceful and established law; his inborn skill to organize things to a mill, men to a company, a community, tribes to a federated State; and his slow, solemn, inflexible, industrious, and unconquerable will.

They brought with them much of the tradition of the human race, the guidings and warnings of experience; a great deal of superstition, of tyranny not a little, ecclesiastical, political, social, domestic. They brought the sword,—that symbol of military despotism must yet fight on freedom's side; but they loved better the axe, the wooden shovel—the best they had,—the plough, the swine, the ox, tools of productive industrial civilization, types of toil and co-operative freedom. For the Mass-book they had the Bible: it was a free Bible; let him read that listeth.