Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/94

82 flesh; the Bey of Tunis cannot bear a slave; it grieves his Islamitish hearty swarthy African though he be. Yet amid all this continual advance, America, the first of the foremost nations to proclaim equality, and human rights inborn with all; the first confessedly to form a state on nature's law—America restores barbarism; will still hold slaves. More despotic than Russia, more barbarous than the chieftain of Barbary, she establishes ferocity by federal law. There is suffering enough amongst the weak and poor in the cities of the free laborious North. England has her misery patent to the eye, and Ireland her looped and windowed raggedness, her lean and brutal want. So it is everywhere; there is sadness amid all the splendours of modern science and civilization, though far less than ever before. But amidst the ills of Christendom, the saddest and most ghastly spectacle on earth is American slavery. The misery of the old world grows less and less; the monster-vice of America, to make itself more awful yet, must drag your cannon to invade new lands.

I have addressed you as citizens, members of the state. I cannot forget that you are men ; are members of the great brotherhood of man, children of the one and blessed God, whose equal love has only made to bless us all, who will not suffer wrong to pass without its due. Think of the nation's deed, done continually and afresh. God shall hear the voice of your brother's blood, long crying from the ground; His justice asks you even now, ? This is the answer which America must give: "Lo, he is there in the rice-swamps of the South, in her fields teeming with cotton and the luxuriant cane. He was weak and I seized him ; naked and I bound him; ignorant, poor and savage, and I over-mastered him. I laid on his feebler shoulders my grievous yoke. I have chained him with my fetters; beat him with my whip. Other tyrants had dominion over him, but my finger was thicker than their loins. I have branded the mark of my power, with red-hot iron, upon his human flesh. I am fed with his toil; fat, voluptuous on his sweat, and tears, and blood. I stole the father, stole also the sons, and set them to toil; his wife and daughters are a pleasant spoil to me. Behold the children also of thy servant and his handmaidens—sons swarthier than their sire. Askest Thou for