Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/156

152 it has not a word against the great wickedness of a nation which enslaves one-seventh part of the people, and imperils the rights of all the rest. Then you see how Slavery debases the holiest thing it lays its hands upon.

Finally, it degrades the political activity of the American people in their industrial democracy.

At the South, it rears up a privileged class—350,000 slaveholders—who monopolize all the education—and do not get much—who monopolize the money, respectability, and the political power. They are the masters of the bondmen whom they own, and of the “poor whites” whom they control. So in the midst of our industrial democracy there grows up a class who despise the industry which feeds and clothes them. Not a Southern State has a “republican form of government.” These men are seeking to revive that old vicariousness of the dark ages, and that in its worst form. See how they degrade the mass of the people, hindering their education, their religion, their self-respect; hindering even their industry. The greatest intellect of the South runs to politics, and yet, in the last thirty years, the South has not produced one single great statesman. Over her head there hangs a peril more disastrous and more imminent than impends over Italy, over Spain, over France, even over Turkey, and yet, in that democracy of the South, not a single politician has risen up and dared to cope with this giant ill, and warn his nation against it.

There is no great political talent developed at the South—no statesmanship. Power of intrigue, power to take the lumps of dough which we send from the North, and fashion them to vessels of dishonour, and fill them with the shame they are only fit to hold—this is the extent of the South's political talent.

This slave power has its vassals all over the North. They abound in the great cities—Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, Boston. Read their journals, listen to their orations, hear what they propose for laws, and see the baneful influence of Slavery on the political development of the North.

But this privileged class, this oligarchy of slave-holders, slave-hunters, and slave-breeders, has long controlled the politics of the nation. Once it ruled the Whig party;