Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/145

Rh reduced to a fraction, with none of the primitive, natural rights of humanity. He is bound to do the duties his master sets, and not only has no remedy, but no right.

In America Slavery is mainly limited to such as have African blood in their veins, though this is sometimes pretty well mixed with Saxon blood. The influence of Slavery appears in two forms; first, as it affects the coloured man; and next, as it affects the white man.

I. Of its effects upon the coloured man. All compulsory toil is not necessarily degrading. Farmer Hillside has two lazy-bodied sons: he makes them work and earn; else they get neither breakfast, nor dinner, nor supper, only a hard, cold bed. It is for their good, not their harm, nor merely through his selfishness, that he does so. Professor Blackboard has two lazy-minded daughters: he makes them study and learn, for their sakes more than his. It does the girls good: by-and-by they will be thankful for it. Grim necessity forces the human race to toil and think: mankind is not degraded, but elevated, by this compulsion of the infinite Father, who in our flesh enacts this benignant law, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Toil and thought are alike an honour and a dignity to mankind. But Slavery degrades its victims, worsens and belittles them in the qualities of man. I do not deny that to the bondmen Slavery teaches certain special things which they would not have learned so soon in Africa, perhaps not at all; things, too, which, under other circumstances, had been a virtue and an elevation: now they are forced on them, not only against their will, but for their master's good, and meant for the slave's hurt.

1. Slavery degrades the slave. It aims to pervert his nature. It is the excellency of the slave that he repudiates his own individualism, is pliant before his master's foreign will. It is the excellency of the man that he keeps his individualism at the utmost cost, and holds himself rigid and impenetrable against all foreign will. In order that every man may be able to do this, God gives us this terrible power of wrath, such a defence even to feeble men, and such a terror to the invasive and usurping will, even when it is of the strongest sort. Slavery emasculates all virile individualism away. This is the maxim of humanity, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” This is the