Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/167

154 like the ten years past, and it will be all over with the liberties of America. Everything must go down, and the heel of the tyrant will be on our neck. It will be all over with the Rights of Man in America, and you and I most go to Austria, to Italy, or to Siberia for our freedom; or perish with the liberty which our fathers fought for and secured to themselves—not to their faithless sons! Shall America thus miserably perish? Such is the aspect of things to-day!

But are the people alarmed? No, they fear nothing—only the tightness in the money-market! Next Tuesday at sunrise every bell in Boston will ring joyously; every cannon will belch sulphurous welcome from its brazen throat. There will be processions,—the Mayor and the Aldermen and the Marshal and the Naval Officer, and, I suppose, the "Marshal's Guard," very appropriately taking their places. There is a chain on the common to-day—it is the same chain that was around the Court House in 1851—it is the chain that bound Sims; now it is a festal chain. There are mottoes about the common—"They mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour." I suppose it means that the Mayor and the kidnappers did this. "The spirit of '76 still lives." Lives, I suppose, in the Supreme Court of Fugitive Slave Bill judges. "Washington, Jefferson, and their compatriots!—their names are sacred in the heart of every American." That, I suppose, is the opinion of Thomas Sims and of Anthony Burns. And opposite the great Park Street Church, where a noble man is this day, trust, discoursing noble words, for he has never yet been found false to Freedom—"Liberty and independence, our fathers' legacy!—God forbid that we their sons should prove recreant to the trust!" It ought to read, "God forgive us that we their sons have proved so recreant to the trust! "So they will celebrate the 4th of July, and call it "Independence Day!" The foolish press of France, bought and beaten and trodden on by Napoleon the Crafty, is full of talk about the welfare of the "Great Nation!" Philip of Macedon was conquering the Athenian allies town by town; he destroyed and swept off two and thirty cities, selling their children as slaves. All the Cassandrian