Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/246

Rh bestowing it on three hundred and fifty thousand slave-holders! He is an official swindler. He got his place by false pretences—the juggling trick of the thimble-rigger. Mr. Hale says, "For every doughfaced representative, there is a doughfaced constituency." It is true; but the constituency is not always quite so soft as the delegate; it is at least slack-baked, and does not pretend to be what it knows it is not.

Here, too, let me say, it is a great misfortune that the North has not sent more strong men to the political work. In time of war, you take the ablest men you can find, and put them to do the military work of the people. The North commonly sends her ablest men to science, literature, productive industry, trade, and manufactures; the South, hers to politics; and so she outwits and beats us from one fifty years to another. But, in such a terrible battle as this before us now, rest assured the North cannot afford to send her strong men to callings directly productive of pecuniary value: we must have them in politics—men of great mind, able to see far behind and before; of great experience, to organize and administer. Above all must our statesmen be men of great justice and humanity, such as reverence the higher law of God. Integrity is the first thing needed in a statesman. The time may come when the men of largest human power may go to the shop, the counting-room, the farm, the ship, to science, or preaching: just now we cannot afford to make a land-surveyor out of a "Washington, or turn our Franklins into tallow-chandlers. When we can afford such expenditure, I shall not object: now we are not rich enough to allow Moses to tend sheep, asses, and young camels, or to keep Paul at tent-making.

Here are the anti-Slavery forces which are not political. They are various.

At first, the anti-Slavery men looked to the American Church, and said, "That will be our great bulwark and defender." Instead of being a help, it has been a hinderance. If the American Church, twenty years ago, could have dropped through the continent, and disappeared altogether, the anti-Slavery cause would have been further on than it is at this day. If, remaining above ground, every minister in the United States had sealed his lips, and said,