Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/144

140 of Now England, in consequence of a famine, wore obliged to wot free one hundred and eighty servants, "to our extreme loss," for they had cost sixteen or twenty pounds each. Seventy years since, negro slavery prevailed in Massachusetts, and men did not blush at the institution. Think of the treatment which the leaders of the anti-Slavery reform met with but a few years ago, and you see what a progress has been made!

I have extenuated nothing of our condition; I have said the morals of trade are low morals, and the morals of the press are low; that poverty is a terrible evil to deal with, and we do not deal with it manfully; that, intemperance is a mournful curse, all the more melancholy when rich men purposely encourage it; that here is an amount of crime which makes us shudder to think of; that the voice of human blood cries out of the ground against us. I disguise nothing of all this; let us confess the fact, and, ugly as it is, look it fairly in the face. Still, our moral condition is better than ever before. I know there are men who seem born with their eyes behind, their hopes all running into memory; some who wish they had been born long ago—they might as well; sure it is no fault of theirs that they were not. I hear what they have to tell us. Still, on the whole, the aspect of things is most decidedly encouraging; for if so much has been done when men understood the matter less than we, both cause and cure, how much more can be done for the future?

What can we do to make things better?

I have so recently spoken of poverty that I shall say little now. A great change will doubtless take place before many years in the relations between capital and labour; a great change in the spirit of society. I do not believe the disparity now existing between the wealth of men has its origin in human nature, and therefore is to last for ever; I do not believe it is just and right that less than one-twentieth of the people in the nation should own more than ten-twentieths of the property of the nation, unless by their own head, or hands, or heart, they do actually create and earn that amount. I am not now blaming any