Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/173

160 the Anglo-Saxon blood, to furnish a new composite tribe, far better, I trust, than the old. What a human basis for a State to be erected on this material ground-work! On the Eastern slopes of the continent, where the high lands which reach from the Katahdin mountains in Maine to the end of the Apalachians in Georgia—on the Atlantic slopes, where the land pitches down to the sea from the 48th to the 28th parallel, there are fifteen States, a million square miles communicating with the ocean. In the South, rivers bear to the sea rice, cotton, tobacco, and the products of half-tropic agriculture; in the North, smaller streams toil all day, and sometimes all night, working wood, iron, cotton, and wool into forms of use and beauty, while iron roads carry to the sea the productions of temperate agriculture, mining and manufactures.

On the Western slope, where the rivers flow down to the Pacific Ocean from the 49th to the 32nd parallel, is a great country, almost eight hundred thousand square miles in extent. There, too, the Anglo-Saxon has gone; in the South, the gold-hunter gathers the precious metals, while the farmer, the miner, and the woodman gather far more precious products in the North,

In the great basin between the Cordilleras of the West and the Alleghanies, where the Mississippi drains half the continent to the Mediterranean of the New World, there also the Anglo-Saxon has occupied the ground—twelve hundred thousand square miles; in the south to rear cotton, rice, and sugar; in the north to raise cattle and cereal grasses, for beast and for man.

What a spectacle it is! A nation not eighty years old and still in its cradle, and yet grown so great. Two hundred and fifty years ago, there was not an Anglo-Saxon on all this continent. Now there is an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth twenty-four millions strong. Rich as it is in numbers, there are not yet eight men to the square mile.

All this is a Republic; it is a Democracy. There is no born priest to stand betwixt the nation and its God; no pope to entail his nephews on the Church; no bishop claiming divine right to rule over the people and stand betwixt them and the Infinite. There is no king, no born king, to ride on the nation's neck. There are noble-men.