Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/154

Rh three hundred thousand slave-holders, owning thirteen hundred millions of dollars invested in men. Their wealth depends on the Union; destroy that, and their unnatural property will take to itself legs and run ojBF, seeking liberty by night, or else stay at home and, like an Anglo-Saxon, take to itself firebrands and swords, and bum down the master's house and cut the master's throat. So the slave-holder wants the Union; he makes money by it. Slavery is unprofitable to the nation. No three millions earn so little as the three million slaves. It is costly to every State. But it enriches the owner of the slaves. The South is agricultural; that is all. She raises cotton, sugar, and com; she has no commerce, no manufactures, no mining. The North has mills, ships, mines, manufactures; buys and sells for the South, and makes money by what impoverishes the South. So all the great commercial centres of the North are in favour of Union, in favour of Slavery. The instinct of American trade just now is hostile to American freedom. The money power and the slave power go hand in hand. Of course such editors and ministers as are only the tools of the money power, or the slave power, will be fond of "Union at all hazards." They will sell their mothers to keep it. Now these are the controlling classes of men; these ministers and editors are the mouthpieces of these controlling classes of men; and as these classes make money and power out of the Union, for the present I think the Union will hold together. Yet I know very well that there are causes now at work which embitter the minds of men, and which, if much enforced, will so exasperate the North that we shall rend the Union asunder at a blow. That I think not likely to take place, for the South sees the peril and its own ruin.

II. The next hypothesis is. Freedom may triumph over Slavery. That was the expectation once, at the time of the Declaration of Independence; nay, at the formation of the Constitution. But only two national steps have been taken against Slavery since then—one the Ordinance of 1787, the other the abolition of the African Slave-Trade; really that was done in 1788, formally twenty years after. In the individual States, the white man's freedom enlarges every year; but the Federal Government becomes more and