Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/215

202 As a fifth, you know in Boston the history of the Metropolitan Insurance Company and of the Cochituate Bank, two bubbles of fraud that burst, swallowing up the property of honest men. In Ohio, banks and bankers have just now committed frauds to the extent of, I think, not less than two millions of dollars.

Then look at the conduct of the municipal governments of New York and Boston, the manner in wnioh they squander the money of the people, veiling the uses to which it has been appropriated, and thus wasting the people's treasure. I need only refer to the rapid increase of taxes in Boston, which every property-holder knows and laments,—and I need not say there is no honest explanation for the whole thing. You all know it. Here, too, I would speak with all becoming charity.

II. Here are some cases of the next class. Not two months ago, the stea^mship Arctic, with about three hundred and eighty passengers, was coming from England to New York. She had six boats, and, if they were crowded till the gunwale kissed the sea, they would hold at the utmost only one hundred and eighty persons ; so in case of wreck there were two hundred others with no chance of escape. This was the owner's fault; and dearly has he paid for it! The ship, in a fog so thick that a man could not see twice the length of the vessel before him, drives through the darkness at the rate of thirteen miles an hour, giving no warning sound of her ferocious approach. This was the captain's fault; and dearly has he paid for it! When the disaster happened, some thirty or forty men escaped,—not a woman or child! the feeble-bodied were left to die. I will not call this the fault of the men; it was their disgrace and their sin! If our fathers at Lexington and Bunker Hill had thrown down their muskets and turned their backs to the British, and been shot down with a coward's wound, you and I would feel disgraced till this day; but I think it would not have been half so disgraceful to run from a red-coat as to leave a woman and a baby to perish in the waters, rather than hazard one's own life. I should be ashamed to live if I had left a woman to sink in the ocean, and escaped myself. It is rumoured that a boat