Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/212

Rh of king, priests noble, and master be denied and set at naught. The natural rights of the individual must be secured from violation by another man, or by the State. An attack on the natural rights of man is the most fatal of all things to the industrial democracy, undermining the foundation whereon ita chief corner stone is laid; for rights are anterior to all "social compacts," and the earliest statutes of the oldest realm; are inherent in our nature, and therewith derived from God. Oligarchy involves a denial of the generic rights of human nature; it depends on violence, and has no permanent roots in the constitution of man; while democracy is only possible on condition of permanent respect for those rights. When the substance of man is thus respected, and his rights in general duly honoured, all special rights are also safe: among these is the right to property, an indispensable accident of man, quite easily secured if man's substance be respected; but if not, then property itself is as insecure in the industrial democracy as freedom in a despotism. So, in a democracy, anv attack on the unalienable rights of man, or any class of men, or any individual person, is an attack also on each one of the accidente of man on property, for example; taking from beneath it the natural basis of right, whereon it might rest secure, and substituting therefore only permanent or fleeting violence. This has not been known as science by philosophers, nor seen as fact by the mass of men, but is yet fore-felt in the instinctive consciousness of enlightened nations, and partially acted on. We are wiser than we know, and build better than we plan; for the instinct of the people has told them that the substance of man must be held sacred.

Now, an iadustrial democracy is not the creature of man's caprice, which might be so or otherwise. It is a reproduction of the law of human nature, and the constitution of the universe; and "other foundation can no man lay than what is laid" eternally in the nature of man. Arabesques of fancy^ may diflfer, as Eaphael Urbino or as Baphael Morgen paints them; they are the creatures of voluntary caprice : but the multiphcation tables, made by Pythagoras or Bowditch, must be exactly alike ; for they represent, not man's caprice, but a necessity of universal law, and rest thereon. So the industrial democracy can rest