Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/262

Rh They are the thunder and lightning, perhaps the rain, out of the cloud, sparks from the electric charge : they are not the cloud; they did not make it. Of course, where the cloud is fullest of the fire of heaven, there is the reddest lightning, the heaviest thunder, and the most abounding rain. Still, the men of genius did not make the progressive spirit of the North; they but express and help to educate that force. In the North, those two educational factors, Labour and Government, are widely diffused: more persons partake of each than anywhere else in the world. So there is no exclusive, permanent servile class—none that does all the work, and enjoys none of the results: there is no exclusive and permanent ruling class; all are masters, all servants; all command, and all obey.

So much for the progressive force.

The regressive force may consist in the general sluggishness of the whole mass of the people: then it will be either an ethnological misfortune, which belongs to the constitution of the race—and I am sorry to say that the Africans share that in the largest degree, and, accordingly, have advanced the least of any of the races—or else an historic accident entailed on them by oppression; and that is the case also with a large portion of the Africans in America, who have a double misfortune—that of ethnologic nature and historic position. But among the Caucasians, especially among the Teutons, this regressive force is chiefly lodged in certain classes of men, who are exceptional to the mass of the people, by an accidental position separated therefrom, and possessed of power thereover, which they use for their own selfish advantage, and against the interest of the people. They commonly aim at two things—to shun all the labour, and to possess all the government.

This exceptional position was either the accidental attainment of the individual, or else a trust thereto delegated from the people; but the occupiers of the trust considered it at length as their natural, personal right, and so held to it as a finality, and asked mankind to stop the human march in order that they might rejoice in their special occupation. Thus the fletchers of the fourteenth century,