Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/150

146 I just now said no nation is safe without the power to fight. In case of war with England, of the four million slaves at least three millions would take sides with the enemy; most of the free blacks would spontaneously do the same. Would you dare to blame them and then look at yonder monument? Did not our fathers draw the great and terrible sword against our own mother nation that had injured us, and yet but little? Revenge is natural to savage bosoms; God enthroned it there, that when the tyrant trembled at nothing else, he might quake at the foeman's lifted arm and the fear of assassination.

Napoleon has put down open resistance, and is not afraid of that; there is nothing left for the people but what Italians and Frenchmen have been trained to love—the assassin's dagger—and he trembles at that. If America keeps the slave from developing the noblest quality of his nature, then he falls back on the lowest. The power of wrath never fades out from human bones; the animal instinct is older than the spiritual cultivation.

Wise rulers do not like to have in any community a class of men who are not interested in its welfare and progress, for such are always ready for rebellion, and care not who breaks through the hedge they have not a stake in. Even carpenters in their shops have the shavings carefully swept up at night, lest a spark should burn their riches down. But no nation has so dangerous a class of proletaries as America. Paris has her Faubourg St. Antoine, and the forts have their cannon so planted that they can play upon it, and make it spring into the air with their perpendicular or horizontal shot. London has its St. Giles's, a double police guarding it through the day and twofold lanterns illuminating it by night. But our Faubourg St. Antoine extends over fifteen States in America; there are four millions of paupers in our St. Giles's. No carpenter's shop is so littered with inflammable material as America. Why, a loco-foco match thrown by a democratic hand might fire these shavings of humanity which we have planed off from the African tree, and then where are we? Be sure of it, unless we amend, one day there will be a St. Domingo in America, and worse wrongs will be requited worse.

So much for the Effect of Slavery on the Coloured Man.