Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/177

164 facturers, free men; but allegiance to the slave power; he swears special protection to no property but "property" in slaves; specific allegiance to no law but the Fugitive Slave Bill; devotion to no right but the slave-holder’s "right" to his property in man.

The Supreme Court of the United States is a slave court; a majority of the Senate and of the House of Representatives the same. It has been so this forty years. The majority of the House of Representatives are obedient to the lords of the lash; a majority of Northern politicians, especially of that denomination which is called "dough-faces," are only overseers for the owner of the slave. Mr. Douglas is a great overseer; Mr. Everett is a little overseer, very little.

The nation offers a homestead out of its public land; it is only to the white man. What would you say if the Emperor of Russia offered land only to nobles ; the Pope only to priests; Queen Victoria only to lords? Each niale settler in Utah, it seems, is to have four hundred and eighty acres of land if he is not married, and a hundred and sixty more, I believe, according to one proposition, for every wife that he has got. But if he has the complexion of the only children that Madison left behind him, he can have no land at all. Even a Boston school-house is shut against the black man’s children. The arm of the city government slams the door in every coloured boy's face. His father helps pay for the public school; the son and daughter must not come in.

In the slave States, it is a crime to teach the slave to read and write. Out of four millions of children of America at school in 1850, there were twenty six thousand that were coloured. There were more than four hundred thousand free coloured persons, and there were more than two hundred and fourteen thousand thereof under the age of twenty; of these, there were at school only twenty-six thousand—one child in nine! Out of three and a quarter millions of slaves, there was not one at school. It is a crime by the statute in every slave State to teach a slave to spell "God" He may be a Christian; he must not write "Christ." He must worship the Bible; he must not read it! It is a crime even in a Sunday school to teach a child the great letters which spell out "Holy Bible." I knew a minister, he was