Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/232

Rh tianity; and one of these days it may be found out that seven-eighths of the courage are at the North also. I do not say it is so; but it may turn out so. So much for the matter of sentiment.

II. Now look at the next point. If the sentiment be right, then the mind is to furnish the idea. But a statement of the idea before the sentiment is fixed helps to excite the feeling; and so a great deal has been done to spread abroad the anti-Slavery idea, even amongst persons who had not the anti-Slavery feeling; for, though the heart helps the head, the head nkewise pays back the debt by helping the heart. If Mr. Garrison has a clear idea of freedom, he will go to men who have no very strong sentiment of freedom, and will awake the soul of liberty underneath those ribs of death. The womanhood of Lucy Stone Blackwell will do it; the complexion of Mr. Remond will do it.

In spreading this idea of freedom, a good deal has been done, chiefly at the North, but something also at the South. Attempts have been made to diffuse the anti-Slavery idea in this way: Men go before merchants, and say, "Slavery is bad economy; it don't pay: the slave can't raise so much tobacco and cotton as the freeman." That is an argument which Mr. May's "mercantile friend" could have understood; and a political economist might have shown him, that, although there were millions of dollars invested "on account of Slavery," there were tens of millions invested on account of Freedom; and that latter investment would pay much larger dividends when it got fairly to its work.

Then, too, the attempt has been made to show that it was bad policy: bondage would not breed a stalwart, noble set of men; for the slave contaminated the master, and the master's neighbour not the less. It has been shown, likewise, that Slavery injured education; and while, in Massachusetts, out of four hundred native white men, there is but one who cannot read the Bible, in Virginia, out of nine white native adults born of "the first families" (they having none others except "black people"), there is always one who cannot read his own name.

All kinds of schemes, too, have been proposed to end