Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/265

252 tical aristocracy. But the Teutons, especially the Saxon Teutons, and, above all others, those in the Northern States of America, with their immense love of individual liberty, hate despotism, either political or ecclesiastical. They perpetually demand more Christianity and democracy; that each shall do his own work, and rejoice in its result; that each shall have his share in the government of all. The women. Ions excluded from this latter right, now claim, and will at length, little by little, gain it. When all thus share the burthens and the joys of life, there is no class of men compelled by their position to hate society: so law and order prevail with ease; each keeps step with all, nor wishes to stay the march; property is secure, the government popular. But when one class does all the ruling, and forces all the toil on another class, nothing is certain but trouble and violence. Thus, in St. Domingo, red rebellion scoured black despotism out of the land, but with blood. If a government, like a pyramid, be wide at the bottom, it takes little to hold it up.

So much for the regressive force.

In the United States we have two peoples in one nation, similar in origin, united in their history, but for the last two generations so diverse in their institutions, their mode of life, their social and political aims, that now they have become exceedingly unlike, even alien and hostile; for, though both the stems grow out from the same ethnologic root, one of them has caught such a mildew from the ground it hangs over, and the other trees it mixes its boughs among, that its fruit has become "peculiar," and not like the native produce of the sister trunk. One of these I will call the Northern States, the other the Southern States. At present, there is a governmental bond put round both, which holds them together; but no moral union makes the two one. There is no unity of idea between them. A word of each.

In the Northern States we have a population fifteen millions strong, mainly of Anglo-Saxon origin, but early crossed with other Teutonic blood—Dutch, German, Scandinavian—which bettered the stock. Of late, numerous Celts have been added to the mixture, but so recently that