Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/87

Rh The office of Attorney-general has been four times filled by Northern men, fourteen times by men from the slave States. Out of thirty Congresses, eleven only have had a speaker from the North. These are significant facts, and plainly show the aptitude of Southern men to manage the political affairs of America. There are pilots for fair weather; pilots also only trusted in a storm.

now to speak of slavery considered as a wrong, an offence against the natural and eternal laws of God. You all know it is wrong—a crime against humanity, a sin before Almighty God. The great men who call slavery—right and just;—do they not know better? The little and humble men who listen to their speech—do not we all know better? Yes, we all know that slavery is a sin before God;—is the union of many sins. On this theme I will say but a word.

The Roman code declares liberty the natural estate of man, but calls slavery an institution of positive law, by which one man is made subject to another, contrary to nature. By the Hebrew law it was a capital offence to steal a man and sell him, or hold him as a slave.

Now if that doctrine be true which the American people once solemnly declared self-evident—that all men are created with equal rights—then every slave in the United States is stolen. Then slavery is a continual and aggravated theft. It matters not that the slave's mother was stolen before. To take the child of a slave must be theft as much as to take the child of a freeman; it is stealing mankind. He that murders a child has no defence in the fact that he first murdered the sire.

When we hear that the Emperor of Russia or Austria, for some political opinion, shuts a man in the Spielberg, or sends him to Siberia, for life—we pity the victim of such despotic power, thinking his natural rights debarred.