Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/122

118 teristic manufacture of his town on the wharves of a Mahometan city. I suppose there are not ten ministers in Boston who would not "get into trouble," as the phrase is, if they were to preach against intemperance, and the causes that produce intemperance, with half so much zeal as they innocently preach "regeneration" and o "form of piety" which will never touch a single corner of the earth. As the minister came down, the spirit of trade would meet him on the pulpit stairs to warn him: "Business is business; religion is religion; business is ours, religion yours: but if you make or even allow religion to interfere with our business, then it will be tho worse for you—that is all!" You know it is not a great while since we drove out of Boston the one Unitarian minister who was a fearless apostle of temperance. His presence here was a grief to that "form of piety;" a disturbance to trade. Since then the peace of the churches has not been much disturbed by the preaching of temperance. The effect has been salutary; no Unitarian minister has risen up to fill that place!

This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact, that tho merchants of Boston still allow coloured seamen to he, taken from their ships and shut up in the gaols of another State. If they cared as much for the rights of man as for money, as much for the men who sail the ship as for the cargo it carries, I cannot think there would be brass enough in South Carolina, or all the South, to hold another freeman of Massachusetts in bondage, merely for the colour of his skin. No doubt, a merchant would lose his reputation in this city by engaging directly in the slave trade, for it is made piracy by the law of the land. But did any one ever lose his reputation by taking a mortgage on slaves as security for a debt; by becoming, in that way, or by inheritance, the owner of slaves, and still keening them in bondage?

You shall tcke the whole trading community of Boston,