Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/340

328 united. The North is strong in money, in men, in education, in the justice of our great cause—only not united for freedom. Be faithful to ourselves and slavery will come down, not slowly, as I thought once, but when the people of the North say so, it shall come down with a great crash!

Then when we are free from this plague-spot of slavery—the curse to our industry, our education, our politics, and our religion—we shall increase more rapidly in numbers and still more abundantly be rich. The South will be as the North—active, intelligent; Virginia rich as New York, the Carolinas as active as Massachusetts. Then by peaceful purchase, the Anglo-Saxon may acquire the rest of this North American continent,—for the Spaniards will make nothing of it. Nay, we may honourably go further South, and possess the Atlantic and Pacific slopes of the Southern continent, extending the area of freedom at every step. We may carry thither the Anglo-Saxon vigour and enterprise, the old love of liberty, the love also of law; the best institutions of the present age—ecclesiastical, political, social, domestic. Then what a nation we shall one day become! America, the mother of a thousand Anglo-Saxon States, tropic and temperate, on both sides the Equator, they behold the Mississippi and the Amazon uniting their waters, the drainage of two vast continents in the Mediterranean of the Western World; may count her children at last by hundreds of millions—and among them all behold no tyrant and no slave! What a spectacle—the Anglo-Saxon family occupying a whole hemisphere, with industry, freedom, religion! It is our function to fulfil this vision; we are the voluntary instruments of God. Shall America scorn the mission He sends her on? Then let us all perish, and may Russia teach justice to mankind!