Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/147

Rh lapdog or the turnspit differs from the wild dog of the Siberian or Canadian woods. What if my father had kept me always a boy, that he might dandle me on his knees; or my mother had forced me to be always a baby, that she might cradle me in her bosom? In its mildest form, from its very nature, Slavery makes dwarfs of what would be men, and might be giants. In the most brutal population of London there are women who steal the children of honest folk, put out their eyes, and then use them as the instruments of their idle avarice. What the beggar, in the rarest of examples, does to the child she steals, that the slaveholder, as a general rule, does to his bondmen: he puts out the eyes of their manhood; and though he burn them out with the gentlest of hot irons, he makes them not less blind. It has long been known that Slavery itself was a degradation, that in making the slave it unmakes the man. “The first day of bondage takes half the man away,” said Ionian Homer 3000 years ago. The contempt which all men, even the anti-Slavery philanthropists, feel for the contented slave, is mankind's testimony against this high treason towards humanity. The fact itself begins to be comprehended in America. Once this was a common argument: “Slavery is bad in itself, good in its uses: it elevates the human savage, and makes him a man, even a Christian.” Now this is abandoned by economists and politicians, and is left only for that class of ministers

See the changes in the slaveholder's idea of a slave. In 1776 he was a man unjustly held in bondage against the law of nature, but held transiently and provisionally. Next, a man held permanently, but wrongfully; an inferior kind of man held as an apprentice to a superior: certain rights allowed him; his gain of welfare greater than his loss of freedom. Now he is declared to be an “animal incapable of civilization;” he has “no rights which white men are bound to respect.” A popular Southern writer says, “Hay is good for horses, bad for hogs; so liberty is good for white men, bad for negroes:” he does not know whether they “have any souls or not.” The Supreme Court of Virginia has just decided that a slave has no legal