Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/280

Rh people of the United States? This is a question which directly concerns the material interest of every working man in the nation, and especially every Northern working man. Before the Ist of January, 1858, perhaps before next January, Kansas, with its one hundred and fourteen thousand seven hundred and ninety square miles, will be a Free State or a Slave State. See what follows, immediately or ultimately, if we let the slave-holders have their way, and make. Look, first, at the effect on the welfare and progress of individuals.

1. A privileged class, an oligarchy of slave-holders, will be founded there, such as exists in the present slave States. They will own all the land, almost all the labourers; will make laws for the advantage of the slave-holder against the interest of the slave and the non-slave-holder. That is the effect on the Southern man.

2. Next see the effect on the working men of the North who emigrate to that quarter. They must go as slave-holders or as non-slave-holders.

Some will go as slave-holders, such as take a South-side view of human wickedness in general. You know what the effect will be on them. Compare the condition, the intellectual and moral character, of New England men who have settled in Georgia, and become slave-holders, with others of the same families — their brothers and cousins—who have remained at home, and engaged in agriculture, commerce, and manufactures.

But not many Northern men will go there and become slave-holders. Some will go as non-slave-holders; and you will see under what disadvantage they must labour. 1. They must live by their work, and in a place where industry is not honoured, as in Connecticut, but is despised, as in South Carolina and Arkansas. The working white man must stand on a level with the slave He belongs to a despised caste. He will have but little self-respect, and soon will sink down to the character and condition of the poor whites in the old slave States. A scientific friend of mine, who travels extensively in both hemispheres, says that he has not found the Caucasian people anywhere so degraded as in Tennessee and the Carolinas.