Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/296

284 steps." Many are leavened, but few rise. A Northern man, a bold adventurer, a bar-room politician of Illinois, born in Vermont, they say, has long coveted presidential transubtantiation. He has tempered his measures of meal with Southern leaven: he is a slave-holder—not born so; he courted slavery and "married on;" he has stirred into his character a great amount of appropriate leaven,—the "emptyings" of Southern firkins, the leavings of Southern feasts, the yeasty scum and froth of the Southern consciousness where slavery heats and swelters and keeps up a perpetual fermentation. In 1852, all his leaven was of no avail; even the heat of the Baltimore Convention could not make him rise to the requisite degree. Now he adds more potent leaven, and drugs his Northern dough, hoping the lump will rise a presidential loaf!

Mr Douglas has made his bid for the Presidency. He claims that the Missouri Compromise was abolished in 1850. Nobody knew it then; not he himself: it is his last discovery. Then he claims that Congress has no right to say that slavery shall not be in the territory.

So the question is, shall we let slavery into the two great territories of Kanzas and Nebraska? That is a question of political economy. Here it is. Shall men work with poor industrial tools, or with good ones? Shall they have the varied industry of New England and the North, or the slave labour of Virginia and Carolina? Shall their land be worth five dollars and eight cents an acre as in South Carolina, or thirty dollars and a half as in Connecticut? Shall the people all be comfortable, engaged in honest work, which enriches while it elevates; or shall a part be the poorest of the world that a few may be idle and rich?

It is a question of political morality. Shall the government be a commonwealth where all are citizens, or an aristocracy where man owns his brother man? Shall there be the schools of Ohio, or the ignorance of Tennessee? Shall it be a virtue and a dignity to teach, as it is in the public schools of Boston; a great charity, as some of you are administering in private schools for the ignorant and poor; or shall it be a crime, as in Virginia, where Mrs Douglas, by sentence of court, is now serving out her time in the House of Correction, for teaching a black child its letters? Shall there be the public libraries^ newspapers.