Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/50

38 the husband and father resent the wrong?—There are handcuffs and jails; the law of the United States, the Constitution,, the Army and Navy, all the able-bodied men of the free States, are legally bound to come, if need be, and put down the insurrection. Yet, more than fifteen hundred years ago, a Roman Emperor forbid the separation of families of slaves, and ordered all which had been separated to be reunited. "Who can bear," said the Emperor to his heathen subjects, ^^who can bear that children should be separated from their parents, sisters from their brothers, wives from their husbands?"

In 1836, the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky said to the world: "Brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives, are torn asunder and permitted to see each other no more. These acts are daily occurring in the midst of us. There is not a neighbourhood where these heart-rending scenes are not displayed. There is not a village or road which does not behold the sad procession of manacled outcasts, whose chains and mournful countenances tell that they are exiled by force from all that their hearts held dear." The affections are proportionally stronger in the Negro than the American ; his family his all. The terror of being sold and thus separated from the companion of his sad misfortune, hangs over the slave for ever, at least till too old for service in that way. The most able-minded are of course the most turbulent, the most difficult to manage, and therefore the most commonly sold. But the angel of death—to them the only angel of mercy—benignantly visits these poor Ishmaels in the hot swamps of Georgia and Alabama. Thou-God-seest-me, were fitting inscription over the spot where the servant thus becomes free from his master and the weary is at rest.

Let us examine the effects of slavery on industry in all its forms. In the South, manual labour is considered