Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/89

Rh world, the Zion of freedom, the Thermopylae of universal right y Do you honour the name of Washington far beyond all political names of conqueror or king? How then can you justify your oppression? how refuse to admit that the bondmen of the United States have the same right, and a far stronger inducement to draw the sword and smite at your very life? Surely you cannot do so, not in America; never till Lexington and Bunker-Hill are wiped out of the earth; never till the history of your own Revolution is forgot; never till the names of the Adamses, of Jefferson, of Washington, are expunged from the memory of men.

When the rude African who rules over Dahomey or the Gaboon country burns a village and plunders the shrieking children of his fellow-barbarians to sell them away into bondage for ever, far from their humble but happy homes and their luxuriant soil, their bread-fruit and their palms, far from father and mother, from child and lover, from all the human heart clings to with tenderest longing—you are filled with horror at the deed. "What! steal a man," say you; "Great God," you ask, "is the Gaboon chieftain a man, or but a taller beast, with mind more cunning and far-reaching claws?" That chieftain is a barbarian. He knows not your letters, your laws, the tenets of your religion. The nobler nature of the man sleeps in his savage breast. His only plea is — his degradation. His defence before the world and before God is this: He is a savage, he knows no law but force, no right but only might alone. For that plea and defence the civilized man must excuse him, perhaps God holds him guiltless.

But when a civilized nation comes, with all the art and science which mankind has learned in the whole lifetime of the race, and steals the children of the defenceless, stimulating the savage to plunder his brothers and make them slaves, the offence has no such excuse; it is a conscious crime; a wrong before the judgment of the nations; a sin before God. In your case it is worse still; the autocrat of all the Russias may have no theory of man's unalienable rights adverse to the slavery he aims to abolish on his broad estates and wide-spread realm; the Bey of Tunis deals not in abstractions, in universal laws, knows nothing of unalienable rights and the inborn equality of man. But you.