Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/282

270 Eternal Father of earth and heaven. What if the majority enact iniquity into a statute! Can millions make wrong right? Justice is the greatest good of all.

With little geographical check or interference from other nations, we are going on solving our problem of "manifest destiny." Since the establishment of Independence, America has made a rapid development. Her population has increased with unexampled rapidity; her territory has enlarged to receive her ever greatening family; riches have been multiplied faster even than their possessors. But some of the least lovely qualities of the Anglo-Saxon tribe have become dreadfully apparent. We have exterminated the Indians; we keep no treaties made with the red men, they keep all. The national materialism and indifference to great universal principles of right shows itself clearer and clearer. Submission to money or the majority is the one idea that pervades the nation. There are few great voices in the American churches which dare utter the Eternal Justice of the Infinite God and rebuke the wickedness of the nation, or talk as with a trumpet. . We have taken a feeble tribe of men and made them slaves; we kidnap the baby newly born; tear him from his mother’s arms, to sell him like swine in the market; the children of Jefferson and Madison are slaves in the Christian republic. The American treats his African victims with the intensest scorn. Even in Boston, spite of Constitution and Statute law, they are ignominiously thrust out of the common school. The clergy are the anointed defenders of slavery. The Whig party loves slavery as a tool for making money; the Democratic party, however, has the strongest antipathy to the African, and uses him for the same purpose. How many great American politicians care for him? To obtain any considerable office in America, a man must conciliate one of these two—the money power or the majority power. But the particular body which sways the destinies of the nation, or its politics, is an army of slaveholders, some three hundred thousand strong. They direct the money; they sway the majority; and are the controlling force in America. They have been so for more than sixty years. I cannot now stop and weary you with