Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/272

Rh 2. The next class is of mean men, of large acquisitiveness, or else a great love of approbation, little conscience, little affection, and only just religion enough to swear by. These men you can buy with office, honour, money, or with a red coat and a fife and drum. There are a great many such persons ; you find them in many places ; and, for the disgrace of my own profession, I am sorry to say they are sometimes in the pulpit, taking a South-side view of all manner of tyranny, volunteering to send their mothers into bondage, and denying the higher law of God.

3. The third class is of ignorant men, who know no better, but may be instructed. At the South, this regressive force is thus distributed:—

(1.) There are three hundred and fifty thousand slave-holders, who, with their families, make up a population of a million and three-quarters; (2) There are four and three-quarter millions of non-slave-holders; and (3.) Three and a-half millions of slaves. A word of each.

1. First, of the slave-holders. Slavery makes them rich: they own the greater part of the land, and all the slaves, and control the greater part of the coloured or white labouring popidation. Slavery is a peculiar curse to the South in general, but a peculiar comfort to the slave-holders. They monopolize the education, own the wealth, have all the political power of the South—are the "aristocracy." But, since the American Revolution, I think this class has not born and bred a single man who has made any valuable contribution to the art, science, literature, morals, or religion of the American people. Marshall's Life of Washington is the only great literary work of the South; its hero was born in 1732, its author in 1755; and both Washington the hero, and Marshall the writer, at their death, abjured the "peculiar institution" of the South.

The Southern "aristocracy" rears two things—Negro slaves, of which it is often the father, and regressive politicians, who make the institutions to keep the slaves in bondage for ever, shutting them out from Christianitv and Democracy. Behold the " aristocracy" of the South I By their fruits ye shall know them. Of the general morals of this class I need not speak: "the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." Since the 1st of