Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/318

306 he owns the smallest finger on his feeblest hand. So poor are we amid our riches, that every eighth woman is to such an extent a pauper that she does not own the baby she has borne; nor even the baby that she bears. Maternity is but up at public vendue, and the auctioneer says, "So much for the mother and so much for the hopes and expectations of another life that is to be born!"

America calls herself "the best-educated nation in the world" and yet, in fifteen Democratic States, it is a felony by statute to teach a child to know the three letters which spell "God." What a spectacle is that!

Nor is this all; but able men, well educated and well endowed, come forward to teach us that slavery is not only no evil, but is "right as a principle," and is "divine" —is a "part of the divine revelation" which the great God miraculously made to man. What a spectacle!

Four hundred thousand immigrants come here openly every year, and a thousand fugitives flee off by night, escaping from American despotism. They go by the Underground Railroad, shut up in boxes smaller than a coffin, or, as lately happened, riding through the storms of Ocean in the fore-chains of a packet-ship, wet by every dash of the sea, and frozen by the winter's wind. Far off in the South the spirit of freedom came in the Northern blast to the poor man, and said to him, " It is better to enter into freedom halt and maimed rather than, having two hands and two feet, to continue in bondage for ever;" and he puts himself in the fore-chains of a packet-ship, and, half frozen, with the loss of two of his limbs, he reaches the North, and thanks God that he has still one hand and one foot to enter into freedom with. Alas, he is carried back, halt and maimed, to die; then he goes from bondage to that other Commonwealth, where even the American slave is free from his master, and Democrats "cease from troubling."

America translates the Bible—I am glad of it, and would give my mite thereto—into a hundred and forty-seven different tongues, and sends missionaries all over the world ; and here at home are three and a quarter millions of American men who have no Bible, whose only missionary is the overseer.

In the Hall of Independence, Judge Kane and Judge