Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/146

142 maxim of Slavery, “Submission to tyrants is obedience to God.”

This degradation is not an accident of Slavery, it is essential to it. It is a function of its prime quality. It does that as certainly as fire burns. By its accidents Slavery may improve the bondman in many things: nothing can compensate for thus unmanning him. If the 4,000,000 slaves were to-day set down in Africa, in many special things they might surpass their kinsfolk there; in agriculture and the mechanic arts, in their idea of comfort and beauty, in comprehensive power of thought and toil; but in general manhood, in self-respect, they would be exceedingly inferior. No finery in dress, no mechanical skill, no art, no literature, no science, no power to sing Methodist hymns and pray Methodist prayers, can ever make up for the loss of that substantial manhood which cringes to none, but looks each man in the eye, and says to the invader, “I also am a man, and if not a brother whom you will respect, then at least an enemy whom you shall fear.”

Man subdues other animals, transfigures their nature by the process, and makes a new creature. The dray-horse, the house-dog, the domestic sheep, are the works of man, almost as much as the printing-press, or these roses, which have departed so slowly from their primitive parent. He does them no wrong, for they are his natural servants; his natural food when a wild man, and his property when civilized—not for abuse and cruelty, but for kind and honest use. He does them no damage: their welfare is not thereby necessarily injured in bulk or in kind. The farmer's horse is as happy as the horse of the wilderness. But yet all these wild animals repudiate this alteration of nature, counting it as high treason. Turn a domestic bull into a herd of wild cattle, or a tame crow among his savage kinsfolk, and they tear him to pieces forthwith; even their brutal instinct repudiates this transformation.

Now, when a man enslaves his brothers, he does them a damage, by personally worsening both the amount and kind of their welfare; he does them a wrong, by perverting their nature and hindering their progress in the qualities of men. The obedient slave, content to be property, differs from the natural man, civilized or savage, more than the