Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/304

292 next day we could abolish it in the slave States. That would be revolution.

America has one great enemy—slavery, our deadliest foe. Do you believe it is always to last? I tell you no! young America! are you sure there is no law higher than love of money and power? sure there is no justice? no God? Quite sure of that? Men have sometimes been mistaken who reckoned without that Host. Political economy is against slavery; it is a poor tool to work with. Compare Kentucky and Ohio, Virginia with Pennsylvania and New York! Do you believe that shifty Americans will always use the poor, rude instrument of the savage? They love riches too well. How weak slavery makes a nation! In time of war how easy it would be for the enemy fco raise up the 385,000 slaves of South Carolina against the 283,000 whites! Where would then be the "chivalry" of that mediaeval State?

Slavery hinders the education and the industry of the people; it is fatal to their piety. Think of a religious kidnapper! a Christian slave-breeder! a slave-trader loving his neighbour as himself, receiving the "sacraments" in some Protestant church from the hand of a Christian apostle, then the next day selling babies by the dozen, and tearing young women from the arms of their husbands, to feed the lust of lecherous New Orleans! Imagine a religious man selling his own children into eternal bondage! Think of a Christian defending slavery out of the Bible, and declaring there is no higher law, but Atheism is the first principle of Republican government! "Slavery is the sum of all villanies; "what can save it? Things refuse to be mismanaged for ever. All the world is against us. It is only in America that slave-trading, slave-breeding is thought Christian and Democratic. Mr Slatter, who had become rich by trading in the souls of men, and famous for preserving the Union, in his slave-pen at the capital of the Christian Republic, once entertained the President of the United States at his costly house in Baltimore;—I forget whether it was Southern Mr Polk, or Northern Mr Fillmore; slavery has thrown down the partition-wall between Whig and Democrat. What European despot would have eaten salt with a man whose business was to sell misery by the wholesale, and to