Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/270

Rh The regressive power is lodged chiefly at the South, where it is considerably diffused among the people. That wide diffusion comes partly from the ethnologic sluggishness of the African element mixed in with the population, but still more from the degradation incident to a people who have long sat under tyrannical masters. It is this which has debased the Caucasian of Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina.

But as the progressive force of the North comes clearest to light in the men of genius, so the regressive force at the South is most shown in the men of eminent ability, ecclesiastical and political, of whom not a single man is publicly progressive in Christianity or Democracy. Compare the spirit of the great newspapers of the South, the Richmond Examiner, the Charleston Mercury, with those of the North, the New York Tribune, the Evening Post; compare the Southern politicians, the Masons and Toombses, with the Sewards and Chases of the North. See the odds between the mass of the people at the North and the South; between the eminent genius, all of which at the North is progressive, but all of which at the South turns its back on human progress, and would leave humanity behind. There is the difference.

This regressive force accepts Slavery as the Dagon of its idolatry, its "peculiar institution;" and Slavery is to the South what the book of Mormon or the car of Juggernaut is to its worshippers. This institution is so iniquitous and base, that in Christian Europe, all the Teutonic nations have swept it away; and all the Celtic, all the Romanic nations, even the inhabitants of Spain, have trodden bondage under their feet. Yes, the TJgrians have driven out such slavery from Hungary, from Livonia, from Lapland itself; and, of all parts of Europe, Russia and Turkey alone still keep the unclean thing ; but even there it is progressively diminishing. As a measure^ it is felt to be exceptional, and publicly denounced; as a principle, no man defends it: it is there as a fact without a theory. Only two tribes in Christendom yet hold to the theory of this unholy thing,—Spanish America and the slave part of Saxon America, the two Barbary States of the New World.

All the regressive power of Christendom gathers about