Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/160

156 first promulgated eighty-two years ago this day. It stands in the way of that automatic instinct of progress which is eternal in the human race and irresistible in human history.

Democracy is the stone which the builders rejected: in due time it is hoisted up with shouting, and made the head of the corner. It was not the work of wise men, who knew what they did. “It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes;” not your forecast, but the Divine Providence that works by us, and through us, without our will. “Whoso falleth on that stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder.”

Slavery must go down. The course of trade is against it; the course of thought; the course of religion; the course of politics; the course of history. All the Cæsars could not save Paganism when the Sun of Christian righteousness shone in the Roman sky. No Julian the apostate can turn back the eyes of free men to love that vicariousness of government which our pilgrim fathers fled from with devout prayers, and which our patriot fathers declared against and put down with devout swords. Meetings of Southern planters to restore the slave-trade, assemblies of Northern capitalists and their flunkeys to suppress agitation and enforce kidnapping, conventions of national politicians to put down the principles of democracy and the Christian religion—can these things save Slavery from its fate? No more than a convention of grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains can protect the savage woods from the axe, or stay the tide of civilized man, which will sweep across the continent, and fill the howling wilderness with farms and villages, and cities of Christian men instead of grizzly bears. Let presidents and cabinets do their possible, mankind will tread Slavery underneath their feet.

You and I, American men and women, we must end Slavery soon, or it ruins our democracy—the sooner the better, and at the smaller cost. And if we are faithful, as our patriot fathers and our pilgrim fathers, then, when you and your children shall assemble eighteen years hence to keep the one hundredth birthday of the land, there shall not be a slave in all America!

Then what a prospect, what a history, is there for the