Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/311

Rh claiming divine right to rule over the people and stand betwixt them and the Infinite. There is no king, no born king, to ride on the nation's neck. There are noble-men, but none noble-born to usurp the land, to monopolize the government and keep the community from the bosom of the earth. The people is priest and makes its own religion out of God's revelation in man's nature and history. The people is its own king to rule itself; its own noble to occupy the earth. The people make the laws and choose their own magistrates. Industry is free; travel is free; religion is free; speech is free; there are no shackles on the press. The nation rests on industry, not on war. It is formed of agriculturists, traders, sailors, miners—not a nation of soldiers. The army numbers ten thousand—one soldier for every twenty-four thousand men. The people are at peace; no nation invades us. The government is firmly fixed and popular. A nation loving liberty, loves likewise law; and when it sets a plant of liberty, it fences it all round with law as high up as the hands can reach. We annually welcome four hundred thousand immigrants who flee from the despotism of the Old World.

The country is rich—after England, the richest on earth in cultivated lands, roads, houses, mills. Four million, tons of shipping sail under the American flag. This year we shall build half a million tons more, which, at forty dollars a ton, is worth twenty millions of dollars. That is the ship crop. Then, the corn crop is seven hundred millions of bushels of Indian corn. What a harvest of coal, copper, iron, lead, of wheat, cotton, sugar, rice, is produced! Over all and above all these there rises the great American political idea, a "self-evident truth"—which cannot be proved—it needs no proof; it is anterior to demonstration; namely, that every man is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights, and in these rights all men are equal; and on these the government is to rest, deriving its sole sanction from the governed's consent.

Higher yet above this material groundwork, this human foundation, this accumulation of numbers, of riches, of industry—as the cross on the top of a tall, wide dome, whose lantern is the great American political idea—as the cross that surmounts it [rises the American religious idea—one