Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/121

Rh the feeblest, the most ignorant, and the most exposed classes in tho community. It is notorious that they pay the highest, prices, tho dearest rents, and are imposed upon in their dealings oftener than any other class of men; so the raven and the hooded crow, it is said, seek out tho sickliest sheep to pounce upon. The fact that a man is ignorant, poor, and desperate, furnished to many men an argument for defrauding the man. It is bad enough to injure any man; but to wrong an ignorant man, a poor and friendless man; to take advantage of his poverty or his ignorance, and to get his services or his money for less than a fair return—that is petty baseness under aggravated circumstances, and as cowardly as it is mean. You are now and then shocked at rich men telling of the arts by which they got their gold—sometimes of their fraud at home, sometimes abroad; and a good man almost thinks there must be a curse on money meanly got at first, though it falls to him by honest inheritance.

This some disproportionate love of money appears in the fact that men, not driven by necessity, engage in the manufacture, the importation, and the sale of an article which corrupts and rums men by hundreds; which has done more to increase poverty, misery, and crime, than any other one cause whatever; and, as some think, more than all other causes whatever. I am not speaking of men who aid in any just and proper use of that article, but in its ruinous use. Yet such men, by such a traffic, never lose their standing in society, their reputation in trade, their character in the church. A good many men will think worse of you for being an Abolitionist; men have lost their place in society by that name; even Dr. Channing "hurt his usefulness and "injured his reputation" fry daring to speak against that sin of the nation; but no man loses caste in Boston by making, importing, and selling the cause of ruin to hundreds of families—though he does it with his eyes open, knowing that he ministers to crime and to ruin! I am told that large quantities of New England nun have already been sent from this city to California; it is notorious that much of it is sent to the nations of Africa—if not from Boston, at least from New England—as an auxiliary in the slave trade. You know with what feelings of grief and indignation a clergyman of this city saw that charac-