Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/223

210 all; is it not enough? It is the commencement of the beginning.

Now, in all the frauds which destroy the property of the honesty in the recklessness which dashes away life on railroads of iron, or on the ocean's watery floor, behold the early fruits of the doctrine that there is no higher law; that religion has nothing to do with the most prominent affairs of men; that property, and not persons, is the great object of government! When the prominent men in business, in the State, in the literature, and the Church of America, lay down this dreadful programme of principles; when the nation executes such measures, spreading Slavery over every inch of Federal territory, and arming twenty-one millions of freemen to hunt down and enslave a single poor fugitive; when it plunders Mexico and Hayti, and lusts for Cuba; when a Boston Judge of Probate betrays the wanderer, steals the outcast, and kidnaps a man in our own streets; when the Mayor illegally puts the throat of the town in the hands of a militia colonel, and fills the streets with soldiers armed with the deadliest tools of death, and turns them loose to smite and kill,—and all that to steal a man accused of no crime but the misfortune of his birth, in "Christian" America; when the soldiers of Boston volunteer to desecrate the laws of God—while Nicholas, with his knout, must scourge his Russian serfs to less noble tasks;—while men are appointed "Judges" for services against mankind, for diabolic skill to pervert law to utter wickedness; when a judge of the United States stabs at freedom of speech in Faneuil Hall; when such a judge, using such creatures as appropriate tools of wickedness, seeks such vengeance on men, for such a work; when the Governor of the State compliments the illegal soldiers because they violate the laws which he has hoisted into his seat to enforce and keep; when America would thus exploiter man and God, do you wonder that railroad and steamboat companies exploiter the public, and swindling goes on all round the land! "No higher law!" "Religion nothing to do with politics!" "Property the great object of government!"

The first line of plain reading my mother ever taught toe ran thus:—

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