Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/152

148 240,000 square miles less was worth $1,100,000,000 more.

In 1856, the total value of the slave States was $2,500,000,000; the total value of the free States was $5,700,000,000. So the North could buy up all the land and goods which the South possesses, and then buy the whole population at $300 a head—black and white, bond and free.

The effect of Slavery on the industrial activity of the country, its business and wealth, is terrible. It degrades labour, it impoverishes the people. It concentrates their riches into the hands of a few, who, like Senator Hammond, of South Carolina, call American working men slaves, and like him add their sons and daughters to the assessable property of their estates.

Slavery is the great enemy of the labouring man who is not a slave. The New England thinker makes a steam shovel which takes up two and a half tons weight at a lift, and strikes four times in three minutes, and with four men to attend it does the work of ninety-six more. This elevates labour, it improves the condition of the working man; it promotes also his education, by mixing thought with his toil: while the common digger gets but a dollar a day, the thoughtful man who can manage a steam engine gets from three to four dollars. Great inventors are the Evangelists and Apostles to the Gentiles, who announce a new kingdom of God, which is a kingdom of righteousness, the reign of peace on earth and good will amongst men. But he who kidnaps a man and forces him to work, degrades labour itself, and commits high treason against the industrial democracy. I know the Catholic Irishman's right eye is put out by the priest, and his left eye is covered up by the thumb of the American demagogue; but, with both his eyes treated thus, I should think he would yet have human instinct enough to know that whoever enslaved a negro, degraded likewise every working Irishman. But yet not only Irishmen do not know it; a quarter part of the American working men, native born, are not aware of this most obvious fact.

Second. Then Slavery degrades literary and scientific activity.