Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/105

Rh cut men off from the land. Those laws at first seem only to make one class rich and the other poor; and merely to affect the distribution of wealth in a nation; but they are unnatural, and retard the industry of the people, and diminish their productive power, and make the whole nation less rich. Legislation may favour wealth and not men—property which is accumulated labour, rather than labour which is the power that accumulates property. Such legislation always endangers wealth in tho end, lessening its quantity and making its tenure uncertain.

Two things may bo said of European legislation in general, and especially of English legislation. First, that it has aimed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few and keep it there. Hence it favours primogeniture, entails monopolies of posts of profit and of honour. Second, it has always looked out for the proprietor and his property, and cared little for the man without property; hence it always wanted the price of things high, the wages of men low, and, in addition to natural and organic obstacles, it continually put social impediments in the poor man's way. In England no son of a labourer could rise to eminence in tho law or in medicine, scarcely in the church; no, not even in the army or navy.

These two statements will bear examination. The genius of England has demanded these two things. The genius of America demands neither, but rejects both; demands the distribution of property, puts the rights of man first, the rights of things last. Such are the political causes, and such their effects

III. Then there aio social causes which make a nation poor. Such ore the prevalence of an opinion that industry is not respectable; that it is honourable to consume, disgraceful to create ; that much must be spent, though little earned. The Spanish nation is poor in part through the prevalence of this opinion.

Sometimes social causes seem only to affect a class. The Pariahs in India must not fill any office that is well paid. They are despised, and of course they are poor and miserable. The blacks in New England are despised and frowned down, not admitted to the steamboat, the omnibus, to the school-houses in Boston, or even to the meeting-house with white men ; not often allowed to work in