Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/157

Rh then the Know-Nothing party: the Democratic party it has controlled for a long time. See its measures: the Fugitive Slave Bill, the Dred Scott Decision; the spread of Slavery into Kansas and other territory; the acquisition of new territory to spread it into; the reopening of the African slave-trade, to fill the South with men whose masters shall force them to work, and degrade still further the labour of every Irishman, German, or American born to the soil! Take the last three administrations—include, if you will, the present; study their great acts; look at their representative men; consider the principles they lay down, and the measures they thereon build up. Compare these with the three first administrations—of Washington, Adams, Jefferson. Try them by the two texts of this morning's sermon—the Golden Rule, which is now a maxim of humanity; the noble word of our fathers, also a self-evident truth—and then you see the effect of Slavery on American politics.

The slave power violates the conscience of the American people, and then seeks to muzzle the mouth. In the South there must be no discussion of Slavery. Ministers are mobbed, tarred and feathered, and driven off. Even a bookseller is not allowed to retail his liberal wares in Alabama, which Mr. Clay, its representative senator in Congress, says is a “model slave State.” So indeed it is! This is the test of institutions: can they bear to be looked at in the daylight, and talked about by every tongue? Napoleon and the Pope say tyranny cannot be looked at: the South says the same. Has the North any institution that it is afraid to have looked at and talked about? Senator Hammond says, “We will send our missionaries to the North, to talk about the wrongs of the people!” The wrongs of the Northern people! where a shoemaker turns into a senator, and nobly fills the place—far better than the accomplished scholar, who but trod on it before; where we turn blacksmiths into governors, and have colleges for the people by every valley, and beside every little stream that runs among the hills! Mr. Hammond's father, a native of this state, went to tho South in a humble capacity, to seek his fortune, and found it by marrying a plantation; and from that wedlock has this Senator Hammond sprung, who says that the working people of the North are “the