Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/92

80 intellectual, moral, and religious. It hinders the application of those great political ideas of America ; hinders the development of mankind, the organization of the rights of man in a worthy state, society, or church. Such effects are the Divine sentence against the cause thereof.

It is not for me to point out the remedy for the evil, and show how it can be applied; that is work for those men you dignify with place and power. I pretend not to give counsel here, only to tell the warning truth. Will you say, that in the free States also there is oppression, ignorance, and want and crime? ’Tis true. But an excuse, specious and popular, for its continuance, is this: that the evils of slavery are so much worse, men will not meddle with the less till the greater is removed. Men are so wonted to this monstrous wrong, they cannot see the little wrongs with which modern society is full; evils, which are little only when compared to that. When this shame of the nation is wiped off, it will be easy, seeing more clearly, to redress the minor ills of ignorance and want and crime. But there is one bright thing connected with this wrong. I mean the heroism which wars against it with pure hands; historic times have seen no chivalry so heroic.

Not long ago Europe and the whole Christian world rung with indignation at the outrage said to be offered, by the Russian government, to some Polish nuns who were torn from their home, driven from place to place, brutally beaten, and vexed with continual torments. Be the story false or true, the ears of men tingled at the tale. But not one of the nuns was sold. Those wrongs committed against a few defenceless women are doubled, trebled in America, and here continually applied to thousands of American women. This is no fiction ; a plain fact, and notorious; but whose ears tingle? Is it worse to abuse a few white women in Russia, than a nation of black women in America? Is that worse for a European than this for the democratic republicans of America? The truth must be spoken; the voice of the bondman's blood cries out to God against us ; His justice shall make reply. How can America ask mercy, who has never shown it there?

Civilization extends everywhere : the Russian and the Hottentot feel its influence. Christian men send the Bible to every island in the Pacific sea. Plenty becomes