Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/224

Rh I hope it has not faded out of the American spelling-books yet; but it is writ plainly on the sky, on the earth: plainer yet in words of fire in my heart. It will be the fast line I shall ever read, as it was the first : I can never get beyond it.

At one extreme of society are politicians, ministers, lawyers, mayors, governors, taking a "South Side View" of every popular wickedness, longing for money, office, and fame,—which will be their children's loathed infamy,—teaching practical Atheism as political science, or patriotic duty, or as "our blessed religion." At the other end are ignorant Americans and Irish Catholics—houseless, homeless, heedless, famine-stricken, and ignorant, a bundle of human appetites bound together by a selfish will. These things being so, do you wonder that crime against property and person runs through society; that Irishmen make brawls in the street; that Meigs exploiters San Francisco, and Schuyler New York, and others Boston; that railroads take no heed of life, and steamboats sink three hundred and forty men to the bottom of the sea P Does not the nation exploiter three and a quarter millions of American citizens, and pulpits justify the deed? You can never escape the consequence^ of a first principle.

Dream not that you have seen the end of this obvious wickedness. There will be more "defalcations," great and little; more swindlings, more Schuylers and Meigses. Reap as you sow—of the wind, the whirlwind. Let the present commercial crisis continue, its vortex deepening, its whirl more swift and wide; let employment be more difficult to obtain, winter cruel cold, bread and fuel dear, and labour cheap, will the almighty dollar be safe? The property of the rich will be openly called "a robbery," and plundered from such as honestly earned, and would generously use it. The world has dreadful warnings to offer. "Protection of property the great object of government!" Bottom it on justice—it stands like the continent of Asia; but put it on injustice—what then? It has sometimes happened that an idol came to an end. "Behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the