Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/272

260 protest against Theocracy, Monarchy, Aristocracy, and even against Despotocracy. Mutuality of origin, community of position—that is all the Northern and Southern colonies at first had in common. Sentiments, ideas, institutions, were quite diverse. By and by a little trade helped unite the two. The South wanted slaves. The North—especially Rhode Island—overcame its scruples, and, spite of the Old Testament, stole men in Africa to sell them at enormous profit in the colonies of the South.

This great human protest against that four-fold despotism continually went on—no man understanding the great battle between the substance of man^s progressive nature and the stationary institutions which were the accidents of his history. At length, things came to such a pass that connection between New America and Old England could not be borne. Between the old and new there had ceased to be that mutuality of sentiment and idea which makes unity of institutions and unity of action possible. The daughter was too strong to bear patiently the dictation and the yoke of her parent; the mother was too distant and two feeble to enforce her selfish commands.

America published to the world a part of the new ideas which lay in her mind. The Declaration of Independence contained the American programme of political principles. The motive thereto is to be found in the general human instinct for progress, but more especially in the old Teutonic spirit, the love of individual liberty, which has marked the ancient Germans, and still more eminently their Anglo-Saxon descendants, as well in Christian as in heathen times. The form of speech—self-evident maxims, universal truths resting on the consciousness of mankind—seems derived from European writers on natural law; the influence of continental free-thinkers is obvious therein. But the first express declaration, that there are natural, unalienable rights in man, seems to have been made a few years before, in New England, in Boston. Is it here thought an honour to the town?—Nay, perhaps a disgrace!

Here is the American programme of political principles: All men are endowed by their Creator with certain natural rights; these rights can be alienated only by the possessor thereof; in respect thereto all men are equal; amongst