Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/116

Rh the passion for place wars still in their members; and yet more against the soul. Old men, they mock at conscience; they pimp and pander to every vice of America. "Give us place," say they, "and you shall have Cuba and Mexico for your Slavery; yea, the bloodhounds of America shall bark from the Mexique Bay to the British line, and the tide of Slavery shall break over the Rocky Mountains' top!"

Would you wish such an old age? Look at the Senate of the United States to-day; at the aspirants for the presidency, I know not how many of them. Nay, look in less eminent places, for the ambition of obscurer men, and pee how it eats out the heart of such as time has spared.

The old age of the sensualist, the miser, of him who worships only place, and fame, and power—what a judgment it against the sin! I have of eloquence, simple power of speech, to paint in words the ghastly fact, There was once a man in America, of large talent and extraordinary culture, born also of a family venerable for the great men it had cradled in its bosom. In him, the discordant vices of passion and calculation seemed both to culminate. He was the favourite of a powerful party: thirty-five times did the Federalist delegates in Congress give their voice for him. They made him Vice-President of the nation. He was possessed of almost every loathly sin that human nature could hold, and yet hold together. He was more than eighty years old when he died. But the old age of Aaron Burr—would you wish worse punishment for the worst man that ever lived? The nation hated him, not without cause; for he turned a traitor to America. Within him all was rotten : he was a faithless friend; a subtle and merciless enemy ; a deceitful father who sought to sell the honour of his only daughter, and she a wife and mother too ! Some night in his last days, I when pain, most ignominiously got, kept him from sleep, perhaps conscience came and beat the reveillez in his heart and his memory gave up its dead ; the buried victims of his deceit rose before him, of his treason, his lust, his malice, his covetousness, and his revenge! Pass him by, only fit "to point a moral and adorn a tale,"—perhaps the worst great man Young America ever gendered in her bosom.