Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/298

286 box all persons guilty of this opinion. Her present law provides that men of three-fourths white descent shall be free—it is now proposed to enslave all who have less than nine-tenths Caucasian blood; so the blood of "Jefferson and Sally," uncontaminated by any new African admixture, must pass through yet four other slave-breeding Presidents before it is entitled to freedom! New York has 862,507 children at her public schools. Virginia makes it a crime to teach writing and reading to slaves. Her highest literature is partisan newspapers and speeches; her noblest men are nothing but party politicians; her chief manufacture is slaves—children of her own Caucasian loins, begotten for exportation. She stocks the plantations of Alabama and the bagnios of New Orleans. Shall we establish in Nebraska the institutions of Virginia? Let the North answer. I know Northern politicians say, "slavery will never go there!" Do they believe their own word? They believe it! In 1820, they said it could not go to Missouri; then, there were but 10,222 therein; now 87,422! more than a quarter of all the slaves in the United States are north of 36° 30'. Desperate men from the slave States of the Atlantic and the Mississippi, too miserable to reach California, will find their El Dorado in Nebraska, take slaves there and work their lives out! It will be a better breeding State than Virginia herself.

Congress, it is said, has no right to legislate for the people of the territory against slavery. It must be left to the inhabitants thereof. There are 485,000 square miles,—not 1000 men, not two hundred voters. Shall two hundred squatters entail slavery on a country as large as all Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Holland? Is it "democratic" for Congress to allow two hundred stragglers in the wilderness, cheating the Indians, swearing, violent, half of them unable to write or read,—is it democratic in Congress to allow these vagabonds of the wilderness to establish the worst institution which Spain brought out of the middle ages; which Western Europe casts off with scorn; which Russia treads under her feet; which Turkey rejects with indignation,—and spread this over a country larger than the whole Roman empire when Julius Caesar was cradled in his mother's arms? If it is so, let