Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/76

72 now; never so much. But here are whole classes of men who practically seem to have no reverence for God's law; who declare there is no such thing; whose conduct is most shamefully unrighteous in all political matters. They seek to make us believe there is no law above the caprice of man. Of such I will speak by-and-by.

It is plain there is not righteousness enough in the people to hinder us from doing what we know is contrary to the law of God. Thus, we keep one-sixth part of the people in a state of Slavery. This we do in violation of our own axiom, declared to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have here three millions of slaves: if things go on as now, there will be twelve millions before the century ends. We need not say we cannot help it. Slavery in America is as much our work as democracy, as free schools, as the Protestant form of religion. At the Declaration we might have made the slaves free; at the time of the Confederation; at the formation of the Constitution. But no! there was not righteousness enough in the people to resist the temptation of eating the bread which others earn. American Slavery has always been completely in the power of the American people. We may abolish it any time we will. We might have restricted it to the old States, which had it before, and so have kept it out of Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and all that mighty realm west of the great river. No! we took pains to extend it there. We fought with Mexico to carry Slavery into the “Halls of the Montezumas,” whence a half-barbarous people drove it away. We long to seize on Cuba, and yet other lands, to plant there our “American institution.” We are indignant when Austria unjustly seizes an American in Hungary, and hales him to prison; but have nothing to say when slave States systematically confine the coloured freemen of the North, or when Georgia offers a large reward for the head of a citizen of Boston. We talk of the “pauper labour of Europe.” It is pauper labour, very much of it. I burn with indignation at the men who keep it so. But it is not slave labour. Paupers spin cotton at Manchester, and at Glasgow, say the Whigs. Who raises cotton at South Carolina and Mississippi? The