Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/216

Rh full of women was purposely overturned by the crew—to save their manly lives!

I believe about three hundred and forty persons perished. I am speaking in a mercantile town, where, if life and justice be not valued, money is. Look then at it as the destruction of human property only. In Massachusetts, the official valuation of a man, whose life is destroyed by a railroad company, is five thousand dollars. Three hundred and forty lives at five thousand dollars each, make the sum of one million seven hundred thousand dollars. That is the pecuniary value of life dashed away through the cupidity of the ship-owner and the recklessness of the ship-master! With gentleness, judge you the men ; look at the principle which lies behind!

Pardon me if I try to calculate the value of a human life, estimating it at five thousand dollars! If, an hour before the "accident," some man had said to these three hundred and forty persons, "I will place at your disposal fill the riches of America, Europe, and Asia, on condition you shall sink yourselves to the bottom of the sea; "do you think there was one man who would have said," Let us take the wealth, and leave it to our heirs, and ourselves atheistically go down? "No! all the wealth of the material universe could not have purchased the sin. Men who would lay down their life for a moral principle, or a friend, would never throw it away for all the gold m California or Australia, or in the three continents of the earth besides. Pardon me for calculating in money the value of human life. A similar case, in its origin and in its conduct, took place in the recent destruction of the Yankee Blade, at California. Then, scarce a week passes but some railroad or steamboat company massacres men by the wholesale,—sometimes, most commonly, through reckless cupidity and lust of gold. I believe America commits more murders than all the rest of Protestant Christendom; taking away Russia and Spanish America, probably more than all Christendom, Protestant and Catholic. But not to speak of the harvest of murders we annually reap, there is no country in Christendom where life is so insecure, so cruelly dashed away in the manslaughter of reckless enterprise!

III. Here is the third class,—offences against the pro-