Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/225

212 ark of the Lord; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him."

The official census gives America about seven thousand millions of dollars. Thirteen hundred millions thereof is vested in the souls of three and a quarter million men! So one-sixth of the nation's property has no natural foundation; rests on no moral law; has no conscience on its side: all religion is against it; all that property is robbery, unnatural property, inhumanly got, also held only by violence. Now the prominent men of both political parties—merchants, manufacturers, politicians, lawyers, scholars, ministers—have declared that this property in men is just as sacred as value in com and cattle; that I may as legally, constitutionally, morally, religiously, own a man, as the pen I write with or the bread I eat ; that when Ellen Craft took her body from her master in Georgia, and fled hither therewith, and appropriated it to her own use, in the eye of the law, the constitution, morality, and religion, she committed an offence just as much as Philip Marrett, when he took the money of the New England Bank and appropriated it to his own use; and that the nation is just as much bound to restore to the Georgian slave-holder the woman who runs away from bondage as to the stockholders' money plundered by the president of the bank; nay, that all who aided in her flight are also robbers, partakers of the felony, and merit punishment. The minister who shelters is a "receiver of stolen goods!" When the million is hungry, will it not one day take such men at their word ? Shall not licentious and expensive clerks, who applauded a minister for his avowal of readiness to send into bondage for ever the mother that bore him; shall not covetous agents of factories, and speculating cashiers and presidents of railroads and banks, say, "It is no worse for me to steal money than for a fugitive slave to leap into freedom! Lawyers and ministers say so. One-sixth of the nation's property is robbery, yet the loudest defended; is it worse for me to steal a few thousand dollars than for America to steal thirteen hundred millions?"

No higher law, is there! So they said in Paris some eighty years ago. "After us the deluge:" it came in their own time. "No higher law! Religion nothing to do with