Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/273

260 January, they have burned four negroes alive, as a joyous spectacle and "act of faith;" a sort of profession of Christianity, like the more ceremonious autos-da-fé of their Spanish prototypes. Yet among the slave-holders are noble men; some who, but for their surroundings, would have stood with those eminent in talent, station, and in service, too, the forerunners of himian progress. Blame them for their wrong, pity them for the misfortune which they suffer. Yet let me do the South no injustice. Her three hundred and fifty thousand slave-holders have ruled the nation for sixty years ; her politicians have beat the North in all great battles.

Now, we commonly judge the South by the slave-holders. This is wrong: it is like measuring England by her gentry, France and Germany by their men of science and letters, Italy by her priests. You shall judge what the whole mass of the people are when the "aristocracy," the picked men, are of that stamp.

2. Next are the non-slave-holders, four and three-quarter millions of men. Some of these are noble men, with property in land and goods, with some intelligence; but, as a class, they are both necessitous and illiterate, with small political power. They are cursed by Slavery, which they yet defend; for it makes labour a disgrace, and, if poor, puts them on the same level with the slave himself. Slavery hinders their development in respect to property, intellectual culture, and manly character ; yet, as a whole, they are too ignorant to understand the cause which keeps them down. The morals of this class are exceedingly low: it abounds in murders, and is full of cruelty towards its victims. Nay, where else in Christendom, save Spanish America, is ^he Caucasian found to take delight in burning his brother with a slow fire, for his own sport, and to please a licentious mob? 3. The third class consists of the slaves themselves, of whom I need say only this—that public opinion and the law, which is only the thunder from that cloud, keep them at labour and from government, from Christianity and Democracy, from all the welfare and development of the age, and seek to crush out the instinct of progress from the very nature of the victims. The slave has no personal rights, ecclesiastical, political, social, economical, indivi-