Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/277

Rh talent and American genius. Money, and the men of cultivated minds whom it buys, can deceive the people, so that the majority shall follow the dollar wherever it rolls. The clink of the dollar,—that is the reveille, the morning drum-beat, for the American people. In America money is inaugurated as a power to control all other powers. It has itself become an "Institution"—master of all the rest.

Three of those bad institutions that I named, whereof our fathers brought the traditions from the old world, have mainly perished. The mediaeval Theocracy has gone out from the Protestant Church; Monarchy has wholly faded from the consciousness of the people; Aristocracy, sitting unmovable on her cradle, has had her heart pierced through and through by the gigantic spear of American industry horsed on a steam-engine. Money has taken the place of all three. It has got inaugurated into the Church,—it is a Church of commerce; in the State—it is a State of commerce; in the Community not less,—it is a society of commerce; and money wields the triple power of those three old masters. Theocracy, Monarchy, Aristocracy. It is the almighty dollar.

In the American Church, money is God. The peculiar sins of money, and of the rich, they are never preached against; it is a Church of commerce, wealth its heaven and the millionaire its saint; its ministers should be ordained, not "by the imposition of hands," but of bankbills—of small denomination. In the American State, money is the Constitution: officers ought to be sworn on the federal currency; they should make the sign of the dollar ($) as their official symbolic cross; it is a State of commerce. In the community, money is nobility; it is transmissible social power; it is Aristocracy, it makes a man who has got it a vulgar "gentleman;" it is a society of commerce. Nay, in the family, money is thought better than love, and the daughter who fascinates and coaxes and courts and weds a bag of gold, gets the approbation of her mother and her father's benediction, "Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."

The fourth bad institution whose tradition our fathers brought, Despotocracy, the rule of the master over the