Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/269

256 the name Pierce, the political lord they worship; in Virginia, out of a hundred native whites over twenty years, there are nine who cannot write the word slave, nor spell it after it is written all over their State; whereas, in Massachusetts, out of four hundred persons over twenty, there is only one man who cannot write, with his own hand. !

Take the two million popxdation of Virginia and South Carolina: there is no people in Western Europe so little advanced as they; and, in all Christendom, there are only two nations or collections of men who staud on the same level—the Russian empire and Spanish America. Behold the reason for the phenomenon which struck many with surprise,—that South Carolina and Virginia, in their politics, have recently sympathized with Russia and Brazil, birds of a feather flock together, like consorting with like.

Here, then, are these two nations, alike in their ethnological origin. Joint in their history, now utterly diverse and antagonistic in disposition and aim. The North has organized Freedom, and seeks to extend it; the South, Bondage, and aims to spread that. The North is progressively Christian and democratic; while the South is progressively anti-Christian and undemocratic. First, only the Southern measures were anti-Christian and undemocratic; now also its principles. It lays down anti-Christianity and anti-democracy as the only theory of religion and politics. In New England, man is put before property, the human substance above the material accident; in Virginia and South Carolina, property is put before man, the material accident before the human substance itself; and, of all property that which is most valued and most carefully preserved, though most "aristocratic" and sacred, is property in the bodies of men.

That is the odds between the North and the South.

Now, the progressive power of America is lodged chiefly in the North, where it is di^sed almost universally amongst the people, but most conspicuously comes to light in the men of genius. Accordingly, every man of poetic or scientific genius in the North is an anti-Slavery man; every preacher with any spark of Christian genius in him is a progressive man and hostile to Slavery.