Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/179

166 should recover his freedom in consequence of his complexion, unless he had more than nine-tenths white blood in his veins.

The slave has no rights; the ideas of the Declaration of Independence are repudiated; he is not "endowed by his Creator" with "certain inalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Accomplished Mr. Agassiz comes all the way from Switzerland to teach, us the science which God has stored up in the ground under our feet—the perennial Old Testament—or in the frames of our bodies, this living New Testament of Almighty God in man; and he tells us this: "The Mandingo and the Guinea negro" together "do not differ more from the Orang Outang than the Malay or white man differs from the negro." So, according to Mr. Agassiz, the negro is a sort of arithmetic mean proportional between a man and a monkey. The up-right form, the power of speech, the religious faculty, permanence of affection, self-denial, power to master the earth, and smelt iron ore, as the African has done, and is doing still, every year, do not distinguish the black man from the Orang Outang.

Mr. Agassiz is an able man, of large genius, industry that never surrenders, and was a bold champion of freedom on his own Swiss hills. He comes to America; he is subdued to the tamper of our atmosphere; and, from a great man of science, he becomes the Swiss of Slavery, Southern journals rejoice at the confirmation of their opinion. Listen to what a Southern editor says. I am quoting now from one of the most powerful Southern journals, printed at the capital of Virginia, the Richmond Examiner; and the words which I read were written by the American charge d'affaires at Turin. He says: "The foundation and right of negro Slavery is in its utility and the fitness of things; it is the same right by which we hold property in domestic animals." The negro is "the connecting link between the humanand brute creation," The negro is not the white man. Not with more safety do we assert that a horse is not a hog. Hay is good for horses—but not for hogs; liberty is good