Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/316

304 it was proposed in one of their newspapers that this old law should be repealed, and another substituted providing that no man should recover his freedom in consequence of his complexion, unless he had more than nine tenths white blood in his veins.

The slave has no rights; the ideas of the Declaration of Independence are repudiated; he is not "endowed by his Creator" with "certain unalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Listen to what a Southern editor says. I am quoting now from one of the most powerful Southern journals, printed at the capital of Virginia, the Richmond Examiner, and the words which I read were written by the American Charge d’Affairs at Turin. He says: "The foundation and right of negro slavery is in its utility and the fitness of things; it is the same right by which we hold property in domestic animals." The negro is "the connecting link between the human and brute creation." "The negro is not the white man. Not with more safety do we assert that a horse is not a hog. Hay is good for horses—but not for hogs; liberty is good for white men, but not for negroes." "A law rendering perpetual the relation between a negro and his master is no wrong, but a right." Then in reply to some writer in the Tribune, who had asked, "Have they no souls," he says, "They may have souls, for aught we know to the contrary; so may horses and hogs." Then, when somebody quotes the Bible in behalf of the rights of men, he answers: "The Bible has been vouchsafed to mankind for the purpose of keeping us out of hell-fire and getting us into heaven by the mysteries of faith and the inner life; not to teach us government, political economy," &c. The American Church repudiates the Christian religion when it comes to speak about the African. It does not apply the golden rule to the slave. The "servants" of the New Testament, in the Greek language, were "slaves," and the American Church commands them to be obedient to their masters. There must be no marriage—the affectional and passional union of one man and one woman for life—only transient concubinage. Marriage is inconsistent with slavery, and the slave wedlock in the American Church is not a sacrament. "Manifest destiny" is the