Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/22

18 asylums with paupers, your gaols with criminals, and houses with unutterable misery in father, mother, wife and child, more money every year than it would take to build your now aqueduct and bring abundance of water frosh to every house! If they have not known it, why it was their fault, for the fact was there crying to heaven against us all. As they are the most powerful class, the older brothers—American nobles, if you will—it was their duty to look out for their weaker brother. No man has strength for himself alone. To use it, for one's self alone, that is a sin. I do not think they are conscious of the evil they do, or the evils they allow. I speak not of motives, only of facts.

This class controls the State. The effects of that control appear in our legislation. I know there are some noble men in political life, who have gone there with the loftiest motives, men that ask only after what is right. I honour such men—honour them all tho more because they seem exceptions to a general rule; men far above the spirit of any class. I must speak of what commonly takes place. Our politics are chiefly mercantile, politics in which money is preferred, and man postponed. When the two come into collision, the man. goes to the wall and the street is left clear for the dollars. A few years ago, in monarchical France, a report was made of the condition of the working population in the large manufacturing towns— a truthful report, but painful to read, for it told of strong men oppressing the weak. I do not believe that such an undisguised statement of the good and ill could be tolerated in Democratic America; no, not of the condition of men in New England; and what would be thought of a book setting forth the condition of the labouring men and women of the South? I know very well what is thought of the few men who attempt to tell the truth on this subject. I think there is no nation in Europe, except Russia and Turkey, which cares so little for the class which reaps down its harvests and does the hard work. When you protect the rights of all, you protect also the property of each, and by that very act. To begin the other way is