Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/53

40 South Carolina tliinks of all "distinguishing characteristics" of the negroes "the most remarkable is their indifference to personal liberty." But democratic Calhoun, with Clay, Webster, and aU the leaders of the South, must unite to make the Fugitive Slave Bill, and hinder those men who are indifferent to personal Hberty from running away! After all the tumult, fifteen hundred fugitives got safely out of the slave soil of the Unit^ States in the year 1853. Alas, they must escape to the territories of a monarch! Of all the ground covered by the Declaration of Independence, not an inch is free soil, except the five thousand miles which Britain regained by the Ashburton treaty. Every foot of monarchic British soil can change a slave to a free man ; while in all the three million square miles of democratic America, there is not an inch of land where he can claim the natural and unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. English is the only tongue for liberty ; it is also the only speech in which kidnapping is justified by the clergy in the name of God. The despots of the European continent point with, delight to the American democrats enslaving one another, and declaring there is no higher law.

There can be no lasting peace between the two conflicting ideas I have named above. One wants a Democracy, the other a Despotism; each is incursive, aggressive, exterminating. Which shall yield? The answer is plain: Slavery is to perish out of America; Democracy is to triumph. Every census makes the result of the two ideas more apparent. The North increases in numbers, in riches, in the intellectual development of the great mass of its people—out of all proportion to the South. Slavery is a bad tool to work with. In the South, there is little skilled labour, little variety of industry; rude farm labour, rearing com, coffee, tobacco, sugar, cotton, that is all. At Boston, at New York, on the Kennebec, and the Penobscot, Northern men build ships of oak from Virginia, and hard pine from Georgia; they get the pitch and tar from Carolina, the hemp from Kentucky—that State which has no shipping. Labour is cheap on the fair land of the Carolinas, the best in the world for red wheat; labour is dear in Pennsylvania, but she undersells the Carolinas in