Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/91

Rh cumulated stores of knowledge, science, art, and wealth of matter and of mind, its knowledge of justice and eternal right; when you consider that in political ideas you stand the first people in the vanguard of mankind, now moving towards new and peaceful conquests for the human race; when you reflect on the great doctrines of universal right set forth in so many forms amongst you by the senator and the school-boy; when you bring home to your bosoms the religion whose sacred words are taught in that Bible, laid up in your churches, reverently kept in your courts of justice, carried under the folds of your flag over land and sea—that Bible, by millions multiplied and spread throughout the peopled world in every barbarous and stammering tongue,—and then remember that slavery is here; that three million men are now by Christian Republican America held in bondage worse than Egyptian, hopeless as hell,—you must take this matter to heart, and confess that American slavery is the greatest, foulest wrong which man ever did to man; the most hideous and detested sin a nation has ever committed before the just, all-bounteous God—a wrong and a sin wholly without excuse.

You see some of the effects of slavery in your land. It costs you millions of dollars each year. If there had been no slaves in America for forty years, it is within bounds to say, your annual earnings would be three hundred million dollars more than now. It has cost you also millions of men. But for this curse, Virginia had been as populous as New York, as rich in wealth and intelligence; without this the freemen of the South must have increased as rapidly as in the North, and at this day, perhaps five-and-twenty million men would rejoice at their welfare in the United States. Slavery retards industry in all its forms; the education of the people in all its forms,