Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/251

238 planting slavery in Kansas, that it cannot protect the lived of its own Congress men in its own capital.

Next look at slavery. Every seventh man is property—a negro slave; and our Supreme Court says coloured people have no rights which we are bound to respect. The Government seeks to spread this blot across the continent, from east to west, from south to north—asks five thousand new soldiers to do it with. A new State knocks at the door seeking to join the sisterhood of freedom; the Government says, "you shall not come in free; with bondsmen you may enter."

Fourth: Look at the antagonistic character of our civilization. So much poverty in the midst of so much riches—so many idlers in so much industry. How many children in prudent, wealthy, charitable Boston, cannot go to school in winter from lack of clothes! See what fortunes are dishonestly made by men who are only the fillibusters of commerce, robbers in a peaceful way I Our industry even now is a war of business—it is competition, not co-operation. How much power is lost in the friction of our social machinery. There are savages in our civilization. In the south, many of them are slaves—in the north, they are free, but still savages. A black sea of crime lashes the white houses of wealth and comfort, where science, literature, virtue, and piety together dwell.

Fifth: Look at the condition of woman. There is no conscious antagonism betwixt men and women; each doubtless unconsciously aims to be more than fair to the other; but nowhere has woman her natural right. In the market, the state, the church, she is not counted the equal of man. Hence come monstrous evils—prostitution, dependence, lack of individual character, enforced celibacy, not more grateful to maid than to man, meant for neither him nor her; and hence come those marriages which are worse than celibacy itself.

These are the five great evils of mankind to-day, whence many lesser ones proceed—drunkenness, crime in its thousand forms. I do not speak to scold mankind, still less to scold America. In all respects save one, we have the best institutions in the world; and certainly, the human race had never so glorious a welfare as to-day. These evils, they were never before so small. History, it is not