Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/269

Rh the ruin of the thousands whom you thereby bring down to the kennel and the almshouse and the gaol. If you get money by that, no matter: it is "clean money," however dirtily got.

A merchant can send his ships to sea, and in the slave-trade acquire gold, and live here in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia; and his gold will be good sterling gold, no matter how he got it! In political office, if you are a senator from California or Oregon, you may draw "constructive mileage," and pay yourself two or three thousand dollars for a journey never made from home, and two or three thousand more back to your home. So you filch thousands of dollars out of tho public purse, and you are the "Honourable Senator," just as before. You have got the money, no matter how. You may be a senator from Massachusetts, and you may take the "trust fund," offered you by the manufacturers of cotton, and be bound as their "retained attorney," by your "retaining fee," and you are still the "Honourable Senator from Massachusetts," not hurt one jot in the eyes of the controlling classes. If you are Secretary of State, you may take forty or fifty thousand dollars from State Street and Wall Street, and suffer no discredit at all. At one end of the Union they will deny the fact as " too atrocious to be believed;" at this end they admit it, and say it was "honourable in the people to give it," and "honourable in the Secretary to take it."

It would sound a little strange to some people, if we should find that the judges of a court had received forty or fifty thousand dollars from men who were plaintiffs in that court. You and I would remember that a gift blindeth the eyes of the prudent, how much more of the profligate! But it would be "honourable" in the plaintiffs to give it; "honourable" in the judges to take it! Hitherto I have called your attention to the proofs of the preponderance of money. I will now point you to signs, which are not exactly proofs of this immediate worship of money. See these signs in Boston.