Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/220

Rh III. "The great object of government is the protection of property!" It is not to protect the rights of man, to give all men their natural rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness I" It is not to protect labour, but only property, the result of labour. "The State—that is I," said the French King. There, at least, the I, that called itself the State, was human: here it is the dollar that speaks:—God's law is to vacate the world, religion to avoid the soil, man to be turned out of the State, and the dollar to come in—more than soul, more than man more than God! That is the programme of principles laid down in 1850 and '51. It struck at all religion, all morality, all sound human policy. It affirmed the worst axioms of the worst digarchy—theocratic, monarchic, aristocratic, despotocratic. A late Attorney-General of the United States, in a speech at New York, in 1851, declared, "Law is liberty: not the means of liberty, it is liberty itself." He applied his words in special to the Fugitive Slave Bill—"it is liberty!" See the measures which were the concrete application of these three axioms—for the atheistic word must also become flesh. According to the custom of the industrial democracy of America, one man out of every eight is considered and treated, not as human, but material, as property. Now, according to that programme of principles, there is no objective law in the universe, in the nature of things or of God, which overrides this custom^ and has eminent domain over American Slavery ; there is no higher law. And there is, moreover, no subjective law in man which has a right to resist this slavery in politics, for though the religious element be there, "religion has nothing to do with politics." So nothing must be done or said to oppose the turning of every eighth American into a piece of human money.

But this class of property has one peculiarity which distinguishes it from all other chattels, and that is, it runs away! For, as the fire mounts up, and as the water runs down, obeying the universal gravitation, so man's mind and body hates and abhors bondage, and seeks to escape therefrom; and God has made mankind so that every