Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/255

242 out to aid the work of protecting the orphan. It was the first time I ever saw soldiers enforcing the decisions of a New England Judge of Probate; the first time I ever saw the United States soldiers in any service. This was characteristic work for a democratic army! Hireling soldiers, mostly Irishmen,—sober that day, at least till noon,—in the public square loaded their cannon, charged their muskets, fixed their bayonets, and made ready to butcher the citizens soon as a slave-holder should bid them strike a Northern neck. The spectacle was prophetic.

4. Now, in 1856, New England men migrate to Kansas, taking their wives, their babies, and their cradles. The Old Bible goes also on that pilgrimage,—it never fails the sons of the Puritans. But the fathers are not yet dead;—

Sharp's rifle goes as missionary in that same troop; an indispensable missionary—an apostle to the Gentiles—whose bodily presence is not weak, nor his speech contemptible, in Missouri. All the parties go armed. Like the father, the pilgrim son is also a Puritan, and both trusts in God and keeps his powder dry.

A company went from Boston a few days ago, a few of my own friends and parishioners among them. There were some five and forty persons, part women and children. Twenty Sharp's rifles answered to their names, not to speak of other weapons. The ablest minister in the United States stirs up the "Plymouth Church" to contribute fire-arms to this new mission; and a spirit, noble as Davenport's and Hooker's, pushes off from New England, again to found a New Haven in the wilderness. The bones of the regicide sleep in Connecticut; but the revolutionary soul of fire flames forth in new processions of the Holy Ghost.

In 1656, when Boston sent out her colonists, they took matchlocks and snaphances to fend off the red savage of the wilderness; in 1766, they needed weapons only against the French enemy; but, in 1856, the dreadful tools of war are to protect their children from the white border-ruffians, whom the President of the United States invites to burn the new settlements, to scalp and kill;