Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/282

Rh Arkansas. But a noble army of ignoramuses, twenty-five men out of each hundred adult white men, will attest the value of the "peculiar institution."

7. There will be no multiplicity of valuable newspapers, with an annual circulation of three million three hundred and twenty-four thousand copies, as in Michigan; but a few political journals, scattering three hundred and seventy-seven thousand dingy sheets, as in Arkansas.

8. There will be no abundant and convenient meeting-houses, as in the North; not one hundred and twenty thousand comfortable pew-seats in neat and decorous churches, as in Michigan; but only sixty thousand benches in barns and log-huts, as in Arkansas. No army of well-educated ministers will help, instruct, and moralize the community, but ignorant ranters or calculating hypocrites will stalk through the Christian year, perverting the Bible to a Fugitive Slave Bill, and denying the higher law which God writes in man.

9. There will be no laws favouring all men; but statutes putting the neck of labour into the claws of capital, by which the strong will crush the weak, and enslave the feeblest of all ; constitutions like those of South Carolina, which provide that nobody shall sit in the popular House of the Legislature, unless, in his own right, he own " ten negro slaves." 10. There will be no universal suffrage, as in Massachusetts; but a man's political rights will be determined by the colour of his skin, and the amount of his estate. One permanent class will monopolize government, money, education, honour, and ease; the other permanent class will be forced to bondage, ignorance, poverty, and shame. This is the prospect which the Northern man will find before him if Slavery prevails in the new territory. 11. That is not all: his property and person will not be safe, as in Michigan; border-ruffians will permanently have gone over the border, and a new Arkansas be established in Kansas.

Under such circumstances. Northern men will not go there; and. Yes, more completely lost; for, if it did belong to Spain,