Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/71

58 Thursday afternoon in Dock Square, to be fired into your bosoms and mine; United States soldiers loaded their pieces in Court Square, to be discharged into the crowd of Boston citizens whenever a drunken officer should give command; a six-pound cannon, furnished with forty rounds of canister shot, was planted in Court Square, manned by United States soldiers, foreigners before they enlisted. The town looked Austrian. And, at high change, over the spot where, on the 5th of March, 1770, fell the first victim in the Boston Massacre,—where the negro blood of Christopher Attucks stained the ground,—over that spot Boston authorities carried a citizen of Massachusetts to Alexandria as a slave; "and order reigns in Boston"—or Warsaw, call it which you will. So much for a brief statement of facts.

Pause with me a moment, and look at the general causes of the fact. Here are two great forces in the nation* One is Slavery, Freedom is the other. The two are hostile, deadly foes—irreconcilable. They will go on fighting till one kills the other outright. From 1775 to 1788, Freedom generally prevailed over Slavery. It was the period of revolution, when the nation fell back on its religious feelings, and thence developed the great political ideas of America. But even then Slavery was in the midst of us. It came into the constitution, and, from the adoption of the Federal constitution to the present time, it has advanced, and freedom declined. It has gone over the Alleghanies, over the Rio del Norte, over the Cordilleras; it extends from the forty-ninth parallel to the thirty-second, from the Atlantic to the Pacific; it has gone into ten new States, into all the territories except Oregon. Since the annexation of Texas, in 1845, Slavery has been the obvious master, Freedom the obvious servant. Fidelity to Slavery is the sine qua non for office-holders. Slavery is the "peculiar institution" of the industrial democracy of America. Slavery is terribly in earnest, as Freedom has never been since the Revolution. It controls all the politics of the country. It strangles all our " great men." There is not a great democrat, nor a great Whig, who dares openly oppose Slavery. All the commercial towns are on its side. There is not an anti-Slavery governor of any