Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/271

Rh first colonies is not yet a forgotten fact. The Puritan still looked up to a higher law. Did he keep his powder dry? He also trusted in God. Coveting the end, he looked for the means thereto. The gain from the compulsory labour of the African slave was not motive enough to keep up the contradiction in the New England consciousness. So before the Revolution this institution was much weakened, and with that disappeared from New England; and soon after vanished out of all the States which she bore or taught.

2. The other thing was to affirm as a principle and establish as a measure the natural equality of men and women in all that pertained to human rights. It was only to affirm that woman is human, and has the same quality of human substance with man. If difference in condition, as rich and poor, or ability, as strong or weak, does not affect the substance of manhood, and the rights thence accruing, no more does difference of sex, masculine or feminine, make one master and the other slave. Not only the proletary, the servant, the slave, but exploitered woman also must rise as Despotocracy goes down.

In the Southern part of the North American continent other Anglo-Saxon colonies got planted and grew up. None of them was a religious settlement; the immigrants came not for the sake of an idea too new or too great for toleration at home. They came as adventurers, seeking their fortune; not as pilgrims, to found the "Kingdom of Heaven on earth." The Southern settlers had not the New England hostility to mediaeval institutions. Theocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, were not so unwelcome further South. In 1671, the Governor of Virginia said that she "had no free schools nor printing-press. Learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best governments. God keep us from both! "Despotocracy had its home in the Southern States. African slavery came to Virginia in the same year which brought the pilgrims to Plymouth. It suited the idleness of the self-indulgent master, and became an institution fixed and beloved in the Southern colonies, so diverse in their ideas from the stern but bigoted North. Still the ideas of the age found their way to these colonies—and led to acts. There also was a