Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/148

144 power of assent or dissent. The general public opinion of the South now is, that the white man has the same natural right to enslave an African as to tame a horse!

2. Slavery degrades also the free coloured man in the eyes of his neighbours, and, still worse, in his own eyes. White men in America change their names to get rid of being associated with disgraceful relatives. If I had a brother hanged for an infamous crime, my own self-respect would be greatly lessened, not before God, but certainly before men. The position of the free coloured man in America is of all others the most unhappy. The poorest Spaniard our fillibusters war against can point to his European home, and boast of the magnificent exploits of his nation, that discovered the New World, and say—

The humblest German, who has nothing but his tobacco, his Lager-bier, and his Kauderwelsch, the patois of some little district he was cradled in, has behind him the noblest of earth’s noble nations: all the generous glories which have accumulated from fighting Arminius down to thoughtful Von Humboldt weave a halo round the head of Fritz and Gretchen, cradled in the poorest German home. The rudest Irishman comes from a country which is rich in great names. Every O'Brien claims to be a descendant from Brennus, who smote Rome to its very foundations. Once Irishmen led Western Europe in civilization, and bought fair-haired Saxon girls of Britain for their own slaves. When New England was poor, old Ireland sent books for yonder college, and bread for this town. No nation has been so despised as the Hebrews; but in the worst ages, in the darkest persecution, hated, outcast, smitten, despised, their venerable beards spit upon by every Christian, the Jew looked back to darker days, and saw the pillar of fire, with Moses walking underneath and leading the world's civilization; he read his Hebrew Bible, full of sublimest poetry, and bethought him that Judea was one of the queens of civilization when all Europe was a wilderness, save a little fringe of more than Cytheræan beauty wrought round the borders of the midland sea. He