Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/149

Rh turned to the Mahommedans with their scimetar in their hand and said, “Three quarters of your religion is only Old Testament; all that is good for anything comes from us; the commonplaces of a Hebrew poet are the inspiration of your prophet.” Did the Christians mock? The Hebrew said, “Your Saviour was nothing but a Jew: ‘God in heaven’ is he? A few hundred years ago he was a Jewish carpenter at Nazareth, doing job work, making ploughs and ox-yokes for the farmers.” To-day at Constantinople the Jew, an exile from Spain, is poor—no where else in the whole globe of lands; even his thrift forsakes him there; despised by the Christian and the Turk, he opens Isaiah or the Psalms, and remembers that he comes from a line of men who, two or three thousand years before, bore in their ark the treasure of humanity, and he feels an inward self-respect, which neither Christian nor Turk can ever insult. But the poor Negro has no history to look back upon; no science, no arts, no literature, not even a great war, no single famous name! He looks round him, and his race is enslaved. I do not wonder at his despair, especially amid a tribe of men who are stirred with such intensity of national pride as has marked the Saxon, the Teuton, since he first crossed swords with Roman, Slavonian, and Gaul.

The effect of Slavery on the coloured men, bond or free, is evil, perhaps only evil. I know the wrong which they suffer awakens very little sympathy with the mass of men, who in their rudeness reverence strength and not justice. But the coloured men are one-seventh part of our population, and America does not rise as the Negro falls; you and I go down with him; for if one-seventh of the people be degraded it is the nation that is debased. Would you feel safe if every seventh house in Boston was full of the yellow fever, and every seventh man was dying of it? There is a moral degradation which is contagious not less than the plague.

There is a solidarity in mankind. You lift yourselves up by your attempts to elevate your neighbour. The New Englander sends a missionary to India: he does more good in New Haven, in Boston, in Andover, than ever in Beloochistan or Siam. You enslave yourselves when you enslave your brother man.