Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/63

Rh "Heathenism," says another Southern authority, "is as real in the slave States as in the South Sea Islands." "Chastity is no virtue among them [the slaves]; its violation neither injures female character in their own estimation nor that of their mistress." Where there is no marriage recognized by the State or Church as legal or permanent between slaves; where the female slave is wholly in her master's power—how can it be otherwise? Said the Roman proverb, "Nothing is unlawful for the master to his slave." When men are counted as things, instruments of husbandry, separable limbs of the master, and retained in subjugation by external force and the prohibition of all manly culture, the effect of slavery on its victim is so obvious that no more need be said thereof.

The effect of slavery on the intellectual, moral, and religious condition of the free population of the South is not so obvious perhaps at first sight. But a comparison with the free States will render that also plain.

All attempts at the improvement of the humbler and more exposed portions of society, the perishing and dangerous classes thereof, originate in the free States. It is there that men originate societies for the Reform of Prisons, the Prevention of Crime, Pauperism, Intemperance, Licentiousness, and Ignorance. There spring up Education Societies, Bible Societies, Peace Societies, Societies for teaching Christianity in foreign and barbarous lands. There, too, are the learned and philosophical societies, for the study of Science, Letters, and Art. Whence come the men of superior education who occupy the pulpits, exercise the professions of Law and Medicine, or fill the chairs of the Professors in the Colleges of the Union? Almost all from the North, from the free States. There is preaching everywhere. But search the whole Southern States for the last seven-and-forty years, and it were hard to show a single preacher of any eminence in any pulpit of a slave-holding State; a single clergyman remarkable for ability in his calling, for great ideas, for eloquence, elsewhere so cheap—or even for learning Even Expositions and Commentaries on the Bible, the most common clerical productions, are the work of the North alone. Whence come the distinguished authors of America? the Poets—Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier; Historians—