Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/301

Rh to steal Heathen men in Africa than Christian babies in Virginia? Worse to steal the son of Pumbo Jumbo than the daughters of Jefferson! Why should not the North consent—all the slaves are to be voluntary "Missionaries for civilization and Christianity!" What is there which the North will not consent to?

Some of you may live long enough to see all this. The Union has been in danger five times, and five times saved by sacrifice of those principles which lie at the basis of the nation, and are its glory. Is that too sad a prophecy, even to be spoken? It is not worse for the fifty years to come, than for the fifty years past; it is only the history of the last fifty years.

In 1775, what if it had been told the men all red with battle at Lexington and Bunker Hill,—"your sons will gird the Court House with chains to kidnap a man; Boston will vote for a Bill which puts the liberty of any man in the hands of a commissioner, to be paid twice as much for making a slave as for declaring a freeman; and Boston will call out its soldiers to hunt a man through its streets!" What if on the 19th of April, 1775, when Samuel Adams said, "Oh ! what a glorious morning is this!" as he heard the tidings of war in the little village where he passed the night,—what if it had been told him,—"that on the 19th of April, seventy-six years from this day, will your city of Boston land a poor youth at Savannah, having violated her own laws, and stained her magistrates' hands, in order to put an innocent man in a slave-master's jail?" What if it had been told him that Ellen Craft must fly out of democratic Boston, to monarchic, theocratic, aristocratic England, to find shelter for her limbs, her connubial innocence, and the virtue of her woman's heart? I think Samuel would have cursed the day in which it was said a man-child was born, and America was free! What if it had been told Mayhew and Belknap, that in the pulpits of Boston, to defend kidnapping should be counted to man as righteousness? They could not have believed it .They did not know what baseness could suck the Northern breast, and still be base.

Who is to blame? The South? Well, look and see! In the House of Representatives there are eighty-eight Southern men; there are one hundred and forty-four from.