Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/231

Rh come theme. The attempt would be folly and madness. There is no "tonnage and poundage" on thought. It is seldom that lawless violence usurps tho place of despotic government. Tho chief opponent of the new philosophy is the old philosophy. The old has only the advantage of a few years; the advantage of possession of the ground. It has no weapons of defence which the new has not for attack. What hinders tho growth of the new democracy of to-day?—only, the old democracy of yesterday, once green, and then mil-blown, but now going to seed. Everywhere else walled gardens have been built for it to go quietly to seed in, and men appointed, in God's name or the State's, to exterminate as a weed every new plant of democratic thought which may spring up and suck the soil or keep off the sun, so that the old may quietly occupy the ground, and undisturbed continue to decay, and contaminate the air. Here it has nothing but its own stalk to hold up its head, and is armed with only such spines as it has grown out of its own substance.

Here the only power which continually impedes the progress of mankind, and is conservative in the bad sense, is wealth, which represents life lived, not now a living, and labour accumulated, not now a doing. Thus the obstacle to free trade is not the notion that our meat must be homegrown and our coat home-spun, hut the money invested in manufactures. Slavery is sustained by no prestige of antiquity, no abstract fondness for a patriarchal institution, no special zeal for "Christianity" which the churches often tell us demands it, but solely because the Americans have invested some twelve hundred millions of dollars in the bodies and souls of their countrymen, and fear they shall lose their capital. Witney's gin for separating the cotton from its blue seed, making its culture and the labour of the slave profitable, did more to perpetuate slavery than all the "Compromises of the Constitution." The last argument in its favour is always this: "It brings money, and we would not lose out investment." Weapon a man with iron, he will stand and fight; with gold, he will shrink and run. The class of capitalists are always cowardly; here they are the only cowardly class that has much political or social influence. Here gold is the imperial metal; nothing but wealth is consecrated for life; the tonsure