Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/333

320 not say I would vote for him; that State will. All the West is on his side. See how many tender-footed Democrats there are who cannot walk over a majority of legal voters in Kansas ten thousand strong, and force Slavery on that State, eyen at the command of the old master. Soon there will be conscience Democrats, as once conscience Whigs. The Administration party may carry their measures; it will be as of old, "the counsel of the froward is carried headlong." In 1860, the Northern Democratic party will be where the Whig party was in 1856. There will be a pack of men about the Federal offices in all the great towns, united by common desire for public plunder; but the party will be as dead as Benedict Arnold. If Mr. Gushing will "crush out" all individualism from the Democracy he will leave no life there!

Such is the aerpect of Slayery now. It is clear what duty the North has to do. She must choose either Freedom of the black man, with an industrial Democracy gradually spreading over all the continent, diffusing everywhere the civilization of New England ; or else the Slavery of the black man, with a military despotism certainly overspreading the land and crushing down the mass of men, white and black, into Asiatic subjection. The choice is between these two extremes.

There are 18,000,000 in the North, all free. The power of numbers, wealth, industry, education, ideas, institutions, all is on our side. So are the sympathies of the civilized world, the hopes and the primal instincts of mankind; "the stars in their courses light against Sisera." The Federal Government is against us—we might have had it on our side if we would.

The last Presidential election showed who in the North were the allies of the South. They dwell mainly in the four great cities, and in that debatable land which borders on the slave States, a strip of territory 200 miles wide, reaching from New York harbour to the Mississippi. I trust the anti-Slavery Society will send out its missionaries to arouse and instruct the people in that border land. There is a practical work to be done—to be attempted at once.

Slavery is a moral wrong and an economical blunder;