Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/272

268 of birth, and the aristocracy of wealth; for there it is not money, but birth, that makes noble. In this struggle the aristocracy of birth is gradually giving way to the aristocracy of gold. A long and brilliant rent-roll makes up for a snort and obscure pedigree.

In that great movement for human freedom which has lasted a thousand years, the city has generally represented right in its conflict with might. So, in the Middle Ages, the city, the home of tho trader, of the mechanic, of the intelligent man, was democratic. There freedom got organized in guilds of craftsmen. But the country was the home of the noble and his vassals, the haughty, the ignorant, and the servile. Then the country was aristocratic. It was so in tho great struggles between the king and tho people in England and France, in Italy and Holland. In America there is no nobility of birth—it was the people that camo over, not monarchy, not aristocracy; son of Charlemagne are on the same level. I know in Boston some of the descendants of Henri Quatre, the greatest king of France. I know also descendants of Thomas Wentworth, "the great Earl of Strafford;" and yet they are now obscure and humble men, although of famous birth. I do not say it should not be so; but such is the fact. Here the controversy is not between distinguished birth and money; it is between money on the one hand, and men on the other; between capital and labour; between usurped privilege and natural right. Here, the cities, as the seat of wealth, are aristocratic; the country, as the seat of labour, is democratic. We may see this in Boston. Almost all the journals in the city are opposed to a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people. Take an example from the free soil movement, which, so far as it goes, is democratic. I am told that of the twenty-one journals in Massachusetts that call themselves "democratic," eighteen favour the free soil movement, more or less; and that the three which do not are all in the cities. The country favours the temperance movement, one of the most democratic of all; for rum is to the aristocracy of gold what the sword once was to the aristocracy of blood; the castles of the baron, and the rum-