# The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 06/Discourse 5

A SERMON
OF THE
CONSEQUENCES OF AN IMMORAL PRINCIPLE AND FALSE IDEA OF LIFE.
PREACHED AT THE MUSIC HALL IN BOSTON, ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1854.
"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."—Galatians, vi. 7.
I ask your attention to a "Sermon of the Consequences which come from an Immoral Principle and False Idea of Man's Duty and the Purpose of Human Life."
Man's moral, as his industrial progress, is by experiment. Many of the experiments fail; but by repeated trials we hit the mark. America's mercantile ability to-day—her power of agriculture, mining, manufactures, commerce—is the achievement of the human race in the long history from the creation till now. So America's spiritual ability—her power of wisdom, justice, philanthropy, and religion—is not the product of this one nation, nor of this age alone, but of all time and all men; it is a part of the net result of human activity thus far. Vice, ignorance, folly, injustice, bad institutions—they represent the imperfect development of man's faculties, and consequent experiments badly planned; and so which needs must fail. The most moral man in Boston did not attain his excellence all at once, but by repeated efforts, by continuous experiments; and a great many of his efforts turned out mistakes. As he builds up his fortune, so his character, by trial, by experiment; first failure, and then success. So out of this briar. Failure, we pluck the honeyed rose. Success.
In the best man's action, there is a percentage of ​ abnormal action: that is; folly, injustice, error, sin—if you choose to call it so. Put all man's moral misdemeanours together, and call them by one name—Vice. They are most conveniently dealt with if put into a basket with a single handle.
This amount of abnormal action, other things being equal, will diminish in proportion to the correctness of the man's ideal of life; and in proportion to the strength and earnestness of his efforts to make his ideal the actual fact of his life: or it will increase in proportion to the falseness of his ideal, and the feebleness of his efforts to make it the actual fact of his life. Vice is a variable, capable of being enlarged or lessened.
In all nations, likewise, there is a variable percentage of moral error—Vice. Other things being equal, this abnormal quantity will commonly depend on five causes.
First. On the amount of activity in the nation; a people that goes is more likely to go wrong than one that goes not; one which goes much, more than one which goes little.
Second. On the amount of property; for property represents power over Nature, and this may be abused, directed wrong or right.
Third. On the difference in respect to property between the rich class and the poor class. Where this difference is immense, there is a vast quantity of vice; where the difference is small, the vice is little.
Fourth. On the ideas which men of genius, culture, and station, spread abroad amongst the people as their rule of life; on the institutions and laws. Where these are good, vice will continually diminish; where bad, progressively multiply. National institutions, conduct, character, resemble the popular ideas as plants grow from the seed.
Fifth, On the pains taken to remove the causes of wrong,—the circumstances which occasion it; an attempt to remove ignorance, alleviate want, cure drunkenness, end prostitution; on the pains taken to comfort, teach, and moralize mankind.
In France, England, part of Germany, and the free States of America, great pains are taken to diminish the amount of vice by removing some of its outward causes. Wise social philosophers look upon aU this abnormal action ​ of a nation as a disease incident to the childhood of mankind, and to exposure amongst pernicious circumstances, not natural to man's constitution, but only native to certain conditions and stages of development; and these doctors of humanity seek to help mankind remove the outward occasion, and overcome the inward and transient impulse to this wrong.
Now, in these four countries, for fifty or a hundred years past, there has been a progressive dimmution of vice. The amount of abnormal action first becomes smaller in proportion to the whole action, and to the whole property, a smaller fraction of the total action of the people. The amount of tare is diminished.
But next, the bad quality of vice also diminished The old error of violence disappears; the milder vices take its place. The chief object of vicious attack is not the substance of man, his person; it is an accident of man, his estate. Vices of violent instinct—lust, revenge, diminish and shade off into vices of reflective calculation—ambition, acquisitiveness, and the like.
Then, as a third thing, vice is getting confined to a smaller class of persons. Once, it was at most universal. Such vice was instantial, virtue the exception* In the age before Homer, every Greek skipper was also a pirate. Now, vice permanently infects but a small body of persons; first, the perishing class, whom poverty and its consequent ignorance makes offenders ; second, the professional villains, not ignorant, not necessarily poor,—for in the division of labour in modern society, general villany has become a profession, whereof there are various specialities—pickpockets, burglars, thieves, forgers, and the like the same spirit of villany having divers manifestations.
So the general abnormal action is getting corrected. First, the snow is getting thin everywhere; next, it becomes less cold in all or most places; third, it gets melted away from the open land, and only lies in a few great heaps, covered up. with dust, or is stretched in long fines where the walls hide it from the summer's sun. Men are attacking also this residue of ice and snow, carting it off to sunnier spots : and so the world is getting moralized; and though fresh snow falls on the ground, yet the neck of vice's winter must be considered broke. The moralization ​ of mankind goes on continally; the proportionate quantity of vice is lessened, and its quality bettered, in England, France, part of Germany, and in free America.
In some of the other countries of Christendom, there is one great cause which hinders man's instinct of progressive development, and prevents the advancing diminution of vice, namely ; the institutional tyranny exercised by the church, by society, by the state, by priests, kings, and nobles. That cause retards the normal action of the people in Russia, Turkey, Austria, the other part of Germany, in Italy, Portugal, and Spain, where the progress of man is far less rapid than in those four other countries just named. This tyranny retards also man's advance in riches, for despotism is always costly; vice is a spendthrift, and, other things being equal, a moral people will have the most power over the material world, and consequently be the richest, and advance in riches with the greatest rapidity,—for wealth is an unavoidable accident of man's development, indispensable for future progress, and the hoarded result of the past.
But here, in America, there is one cause which tends to check the progressive diminution of abnormal action, and the advancing moralization of man, and which actually is now leading to a frightful development of vice in most hateful and dangerous forms; indeed, a cause which tends to demoralize the people here, even more rapidly than tyranny itself is doing in Russia, Austria, Turkey, Italy, Portugal, and Spain* Here is the cause: it is the prevalence of an immoral principle, a false idea of man's duty, boldly set forth by men of great prominence, and within the last few years very widely spread.
To understand this false idea the better, and see how fatally it operates against us, look a little at the circumstances of the nation, wherein we differ from the other families of men. The old civilizations of Europe had two distinctive characteristic marks.
First, they were oligarchic, having a government of all but by a few, and for the sake of a few. Sometimes it was a theocratic oligarchy—the rule of priests over the people; sometimes a monarchic oligarchy—the rule of kings over the subjects; sometimes an aristocratic oli​ garchy—the rule of the nobility over the plebeian class; sometimes a despotocratic oligarchy—the rule of masters over their slaves. In all these four cases, the mass of men were deemed of no value except as servants to the oligarch. He was " born to eat up the com/' to wear the flowers in the garland round his brow ; the mass of men were only born to create coen for him to eat, and rear flowers for him to wear. But if you "drive out Nature with a pitch-fork, still nevertheless she comes back." And so the people tended to rebellion, casting off the yoke of priest, king, noble, master. To check this revolutionary spirit, the ruling power spreads abroad the idea that such rebellion is the greatest offence which man can commit; it is high treason. So in the theocratic oligarchy it was high treason to doubt or deny the exclusive rule of the priest; in the monarchic, the exclusive rule of the king; in the aristocratic, the exclusive rule of the nobilitary class; and, in the despotocratic, the exclusive rule of the master. It was taught there was np natural right of men above the conventional privilege of the priest, king, noble, and master; no law of God above the enactment of earthly rulers. This characteristic mark of the old civilization is somewhat effaced in France and England ; but still even there the handwriting is yet so plain that h6 may read who runs.
That is the first characteristic. Here is the next. Therein, civilization was military, not industrial; the art to produce was put below the art to destroy. Productive industry was counted " an illiberal art;" it was despised; destructive fighting was "liberal" work; it was honoured. Working was for the mass of the people, and must be degraded; fighting, the rulers* business, and held honourable. "It is the business of a man to fight, of a slave to work," quoth Homer. Besides, fighting was indispensable for these unnatural rulers, not only to stave off a foreign foe, but at home to keep the mass of the people down. This characteristic mark of all the governments of the old world is likewise somewhat effaced in mercantile England and France, but still writ in letters of fire, most savagely plain. Such oligarchies do not rest on the permanent moral nature of man, but only on the transient selfishness incident to a low stage of development. Their ​ support is not in the conscience of the mass of men, but in the violence of the few who rule; not in the consent of the Hungarians and Poles, but in the cannons of the Emperor and the Czar. Military violence is the complement of oligarchy, for the special privilege of the oligarch is held of his private selfishness, and against mankind; not of his human nature, and for all the people; is a conventional, not a natural accident of humanity. Hence is it also insecure: for what will not even touch firm ground with its feet must one day with its head.
Now, the American civilization has two characteristics exactly opposite to these. First, it is not oligarchic; it is a democracy; in theory, having a government of all, for all, by all. Next, it is industrial, and not military.
I. This democracy, in theory, rests on the idea that the substance of manhood, the human nature in which all are alike, is superior to any human accident wherein all must differ. Manhood is more than priesthood, kinghood, noblehood, masterhood. The qualitative human agreement of nature is more than the quantitative difference between the genius and the clown; more than the historic and conventional distinction between noble-born and common-born, rich and poor. So democracy can exist only on condition that this human substance is equally respected in the greatest and the least; in man and woman; in the largest majority, and in the minority of one, that stands on manhood. So the people is not for the ruler, but the ruler for the people ; the government is the creature of the nation, not the nation of the government. Each man's natural rights are to be sacred against the wrong-doing of any other man, or of the whole nation of men — all protected against each, each against all. That is the first point.
II. Then the American civilization is also industrial. Military power is to be exceptional, subordinate; the industrial is instantial and chief. Now, industry aims at the production and enjoyment of property; for, in a word, industry is the art of making material nature into human property. Property is a natural accident of man, inseparable from his substance. The first thing he does on ​ coming into the world is to acquire property; first food, then shelter. The first thing the baoy does is this; the earliest generation of babies—baby men—their first deed was acquisition; food for existence, flowers for ornament. Proper, is the material result and test of man's normal activity. It is also the indispensable condition of existence from day to day; much and permanent property is the indispensable condition for the advance and development of mankind, in mind and conscience, heart and soul. It is an accident of more value than all other external accidents—priestly, kingly, nobilitary, and despotocratic. In the industrial state, money is the symbol of power, for the individual and for the nation; it is worth more than descent from priestly Moses, or Luther, from royal Charlemagne, or protectorial Cromwell, or from any nobilitary stem, "All the blood of all the Howards" is powerless, compared to the almighty dollar.
Democracy is not possible except in a nation where there is so much property, and that so widely distributed that the whole people can have considerable education—intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious. So much property, widely distributed, judiciously appKed, is the indispensable material basis of a democracy; as military power is indispensable to the existence of an unnatural oligarchy—priestly, monarchic, nobilitary, or despotocratic; and as those tyrannical rulers must have] military power to keep the people down, so in a democracy the people must have property—the result of their industry—to keep themselves up, and advance their education; else, very soon there will be a government over all, but by a few, and for the sake of a few; and democracy will end in despotism. But it must be natural property resting on a basis of natural morality, consisting of what man may own and not violate his moral nature. There can be no natural property which violates natural right, the constitution of the universe.
Accordingly, fipom the nature of such a government, it becomes necessanr, in every industrial democracy, to have one thing sacred:—the natural rights of man, the substance of humanity. This is the prime factor of all the national product. If the natural rights of man be not respected, then the democracy will perish, just as the oligarchy will come to an end if the pretended privilege ​ of king, priests noble, and master be denied and set at naught. The natural rights of the individual must be secured from violation by another man, or by the State. An attack on the natural rights of man is the most fatal of all things to the industrial democracy, undermining the foundation whereon ita chief corner stone is laid; for rights are anterior to all "social compacts," and the earliest statutes of the oldest realm; are inherent in our nature, and therewith derived from God. Oligarchy involves a denial of the generic rights of human nature; it depends on violence, and has no permanent roots in the constitution of man; while democracy is only possible on condition of permanent respect for those rights.
When the substance of man is thus respected, and his rights in general duly honoured, all special rights are also safe: among these is the right to property, an indispensable accident of man, quite easily secured if man's substance be respected; but if not, then property itself is as insecure in the industrial democracy as freedom in a despotism. So, in a democracy, anv attack on the unalienable rights of man, or any class of men, or any individual person, is an attack also on each one of the accidente of man on property, for example; taking from beneath it the natural basis of right, whereon it might rest secure, and substituting therefore only permanent or fleeting violence. This has not been known as science by philosophers, nor seen as fact by the mass of men, but is yet fore-felt in the instinctive consciousness of enlightened nations, and partially acted on. We are wiser than we know, and build better than we plan; for the instinct of the people has told them that the substance of man must be held sacred.
Now, an iadustrial democracy is not the creature of man's caprice, which might be so or otherwise. It is a reproduction of the law of human nature, and the constitution of the universe; and "other foundation can no man lay than what is laid" eternally in the nature of man. Arabesques of fancy^ may diflfer, as Eaphael Urbino or as Baphael Morgen paints them; they are the creatures of voluntary caprice : but the multiphcation tables, made by Pythagoras or Bowditch, must be exactly alike ; for they represent, not man's caprice, but a necessity of universal law, and rest thereon. So the industrial democracy can rest ​ only on the law of God, writ in the constitution of matter and mind; accordingly, the greatest of all political errors, and the most fatal to the existence of democracy, to the rights of man, and to the security of property, one of his indispensable accidents, is the idea that man has no obligation to respect the constitution of the universe ; and the declaration that there is no law above the statutes which men's hands have made. Where that idea prevails, there is a blow struck at every man's head, and at each dollar of property. Tyranny may be provisional; justice alone is ultimate; the point common to each and all, to man and God, whereon all rights balance.
Such is the difference between the theory of American civilization and that of the old civilizations of Asia and Europe;—ours is the theory of a society that is only pessible nineteen centuries after Christ ; nine centuries after it could not have been ; and nine centuries before it could not have been dreamed of; and such is its foundation in man and the nature of things.
I have just said that, in virtue of certain causes, there is a progressive diminution of man's abnormal action, and a progressive moralization of mankind in England, France part of Germany, and the free States of America; but that in some other European countries this natural diminution of wrong is retarded by the crimes of the ruling power. Nay, even in England and France, man's moralization is largely retarded by the corruption and selfishness of the controlling classes of men, who spread abroad false ideas of paan's duty to himself, to his brother, and to his God;—sometimes doing it purposely, but most often, I have charity enough to think, doing it through mistake. Still this diminution goes on in the manner set forth.
Now, in America, in direct opposition to this progressive moralization of man, during the last few years there has been a rapid increase of certain great vices, which are also crimes; transgressions not only of God's law, but likewise of man's statutes,—vices of appalling magnitude. They are offences not committed by those two classes just mentioned as concentrating a great amount of what is commonly called vice and crime—the perishing class, whom poverty makes thieves and robbers, and the professional villains, who make rascality their vocation, Nor yet are ​ they committed under the transient and accidental stimulus of strong drink, or temporary malice, or passion, that springs upon the man,—causes which gender so many brawls and murders. These offences are committed by persons of high standing in society, done deliberately, the man knowing very well what he is about.
For convenience in my handling and your remembering, I will put these into three classes. First, offences against the property of individuals; next, offences against the life of individuals for the sake of getting their property; and third, offences against the property and the life of other nations. The first and second are individual,—personal vices; the last is national,—a collective vice.
I. Here are some cases which I put in the first class, offences against property. I will not travel out of America, nor go back more than twelve months. Let me save at the outset, of the individuals who have done the deeds I refer to, I would speak and judge with the greatest delicacy and the most refined charity. It is the deed itself on which I wish to fasten your condemnation, not the man who did it; for I want you to look through the man at the deed; through the deed, at the cause of it, lying far behind, which I will presently bring before your eye.
Here is the first in the first class. Mr. Crane, President of the New England railroad, deprived the company of I know not how large a sum of money entrusted to him. In this particular case there was much in the man's character, and has been much in his conduct since,—which, I am told, is, in general, manly and upright,—to lead to a favourable judgment of him. It is the deed I look at, and the principle which lies behind the deed, which I condemn: for the man, I have a woman's charity; for the deed and the principle behind it, a man's justice.
Here is the next case. Mr. Schuyler, at New York, plundered the public of about two millions of dollars, committing the largest fraud of the kind ever perpetrated in America or Europe.
Here is the third. In California, Mr. Meigs robbed the public of one million six hundred thousand dollars.
As a fourth thing, in New York, the Ocean Bank has robbed the public of one or two hundred thousand dollars. ​ As a fifth, you know in Boston the history of the Metropolitan Insurance Company and of the Cochituate Bank, two bubbles of fraud that burst, swallowing up the property of honest men.
In Ohio, banks and bankers have just now committed frauds to the extent of, I think, not less than two millions of dollars.
Then look at the conduct of the municipal governments of New York and Boston, the manner in wnioh they squander the money of the people, veiling the uses to which it has been appropriated, and thus wasting the people's treasure. I need only refer to the rapid increase of taxes in Boston, which every property-holder knows and laments,—and I need not say there is no honest explanation for the whole thing. You all know it. Here, too, I would speak with all becoming charity.
II. Here are some cases of the next class. Not two months ago, the stea^mship Arctic, with about three hundred and eighty passengers, was coming from England to New York. She had six boats, and, if they were crowded till the gunwale kissed the sea, they would hold at the utmost only one hundred and eighty persons ; so in case of wreck there were two hundred others with no chance of escape. This was the owner's fault; and dearly has he paid for it! The ship, in a fog so thick that a man could not see twice the length of the vessel before him, drives through the darkness at the rate of thirteen miles an hour, giving no warning sound of her ferocious approach. This was the captain's fault; and dearly has he paid for it! When the disaster happened, some thirty or forty men escaped,—not a woman or child! the feeble-bodied were left to die. I will not call this the fault of the men; it was their disgrace and their sin! If our fathers at Lexington and Bunker Hill had thrown down their muskets and turned their backs to the British, and been shot down with a coward's wound, you and I would feel disgraced till this day; but I think it would not have been half so disgraceful to run from a red-coat as to leave a woman and a baby to perish in the waters, rather than hazard one's own life. I should be ashamed to live if I had left a woman to sink in the ocean, and escaped myself. It is rumoured that a boat ​ full of women was purposely overturned by the crew—to save their manly lives!
I believe about three hundred and forty persons perished. I am speaking in a mercantile town, where, if life and justice be not valued, money is. Look then at it as the destruction of human property only. In Massachusetts, the official valuation of a man, whose life is destroyed by a railroad company, is five thousand dollars. Three hundred and forty lives at five thousand dollars each, make the sum of one million seven hundred thousand dollars. That is the pecuniary value of life dashed away through the cupidity of the ship-owner and the recklessness of the ship-master! With gentleness, judge you the men ; look at the principle which lies behind!
Pardon me if I try to calculate the value of a human life, estimating it at five thousand dollars! If, an hour before the "accident," some man had said to these three hundred and forty persons, "I will place at your disposal fill the riches of America, Europe, and Asia, on condition you shall sink yourselves to the bottom of the sea; "do you think there was one man who would have said," Let us take the wealth, and leave it to our heirs, and ourselves atheistically go down? "No! all the wealth of the material universe could not have purchased the sin. Men who would lay down their life for a moral principle, or a friend, would never throw it away for all the gold m California or Australia, or in the three continents of the earth besides. Pardon me for calculating in money the value of human life.
A similar case, in its origin and in its conduct, took place in the recent destruction of the Yankee Blade, at California. Then, scarce a week passes but some railroad or steamboat company massacres men by the wholesale,—sometimes, most commonly, through reckless cupidity and lust of gold. I believe America commits more murders than all the rest of Protestant Christendom; taking away Russia and Spanish America, probably more than all Christendom, Protestant and Catholic. But not to speak of the harvest of murders we annually reap, there is no country in Christendom where life is so insecure, so cruelly dashed away in the manslaughter of reckless enterprise!
III. Here is the third class,—offences against the pro​ perty and life of other nations. You may take the whole history of the present national administration. Look at the conduct of this government for the last two years of its unhappy and disgraceful life ; at the perpetual fillibustering of the government, now against Mexico, then against Hayti, then against Cuba; at that murderous attack on Greytown, not only wicked, hut mean, cowardly, and sneaking! not a Narragansett Indian but would have been ashamed of such unbarbarous conduct! But it has been commended, I know not in how many journals; and one in this city declares it had "the entire approbation of the whole community." See how steadily the administration seeks to tighten the chains on the working class of the South: no Italian pope, no king, nor priest, was ever more oppressive towards his subjects than the American industrial democracy towards the three and a quarter millions of men who do the work of the South.
These three classes of cases are exceptions to the progressive diminution of abnormal action, and to the advancing moralization of the people. They are not to be explained by the common causes of vice.
Look back a little, and you will see the root out of which all this monstrous crop of wickedness has grown so swiftly up. I will omit all reference to individuals, and speak impersonally. A few years ago three axioms were published to the world as embodying the fundamentals of the party then in power. They were laid down as a programme of principles for the nation's future politics. Let it be remembered that this political party has more literary education, and more hoarded money, than any other whatsoever in the land. But the rival party affirmed the same principles, having therewith unity of idea.
Here are the maxims—
The first, which I give in my own language, is this: There is no law of God above any statutes, however wicked, which politicians make.
The next, which is not in my words, is, "Religion has nothing to do with politics; there it makes men mad."
The third is, "The great object of government is the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad." ​ Look at these—
I. "There is no higher law!" That Is the proclamation of objective atheism; it is the selfish materialism of Hobbes, Hume, of De la Mettrie, and Helvetius, gone to seed. You have nothing to rely on above the politicians and their statutes: if you suffer, nothing to appeal to—but the ballot-box. The speculative materialism of Comte resolves man into blood and bone and nerves. The speculative atheism of Feuerbach resolves deity into the blind force of a blind universe, working from no love as motive, with no plan as method, and for no purpose as ultimate end. But both of these, materialistic Comte and atheistic Feuerbach, bow them down before the eternal laws of matter and mind: "These," say they, "we must keep always, come what may." But the prominent politicians of America,—they mocked at the law of nature and the constitution of mind; they outdid the "French materialism" of Comte, and the "Germanic atheism" of Feuerbach. Pardon me for saying Germanic atheism! He violated his nation's consciousness before he called himself an atheist; and then is not so in heart, only in head; it is the blood of pious humanity which runs in his nation's veins. The sailor, the machinist, and the farmer recognise a law of God writ in the matter they deal with, whereto they seek to Conform ; but the American politician has no objective restraint. No God is to check the momentum of his ambition.
II. Here is the next axiom: "Religion has nothing to do with politics." That is subjective atheism, with a political application. If there be no law inherent in mind and matter above any wicked statute of a tyrant, still the instinctive religious sense of man looks up with reverence, faith, and love, and thinks there is a God, and a higher law. Materialistic Comte and atheistic Feuerbach, and those accomplished translators who set such works over to the English soil, confess to the natural religious emotions, give them sure place in all human affairs ; but in one of the most important of human transactions, where the welfare of millions of men is at stake, the American politicians declare that "Religion has nothing to do with politics; it makes men mad." Politic Felix trembled before Paul, ​ reasoning of self-command, righteousness, and God's judgment to come; Festus told the magnificent apostle, "Much learning hath made thee mad;" but the heathen Roman did not venture to say, "Religion makes men mad!" Conscience makes cowards of men who meditate their own destruction; nay, it sometimes holds the murderer's hand. But the moral feeling, the religious feeling, has nothing to do with politics!
No higher law! Religion nothing to do With politics!
See what it leads to. Come, Puritan fathers I who, feeding on clams for three months at a time, thanked-God that they "sucked of the abundance of the seas, and of the treasures hid in the sands!" You were mistaken! Religion has nothing to do with politics! Bow to the Eighth Henry, to "Bloody" Mary, and Elizabeth, scarce cleaner in the hand or heart; to James the Stupid, and to Charles, whose head the righteous axe shore off! Come, Protestant martyrs ; whose bodies snapped and crackled in the Catholic fire, but, as the candle decayed, your soul still flaming more ardent up to God I Come and submit! It was all a mistake I The priestly tyrants were right! There is no higher law! Come, glorious company of the apostles! G)me, goodly fellowship of the prophets! Come, noble army of martyrs! Come, Jesus of Nazareth—crowned with thorns, spit upon, scourged, mocked at, and crucified! It was all a mistake! Your cross was not your crown of triumph; it was only your shame! The scribes and Pharisees were right! There is no higher law! Religion has nothing to do with politics!
​ III. "The great object of government is the protection of property!" It is not to protect the rights of man, to give all men their natural rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness I" It is not to protect labour, but only property, the result of labour. "The State—that is I," said the French King. There, at least, the I, that called itself the State, was human: here it is the dollar that speaks:—God's law is to vacate the world, religion to avoid the soil, man to be turned out of the State, and the dollar to come in—more than soul, more than man more than God!
That is the programme of principles laid down in 1850 and '51. It struck at all religion, all morality, all sound human policy. It affirmed the worst axioms of the worst digarchy—theocratic, monarchic, aristocratic, despotocratic. A late Attorney-General of the United States, in a speech at New York, in 1851, declared, "Law is liberty: not the means of liberty, it is liberty itself." He applied his words in special to the Fugitive Slave Bill—"it is liberty!"
See the measures which were the concrete application of these three axioms—for the atheistic word must also become flesh. According to the custom of the industrial democracy of America, one man out of every eight is considered and treated, not as human, but material, as property. Now, according to that programme of principles, there is no objective law in the universe, in the nature of things or of God, which overrides this custom^ and has eminent domain over American Slavery ; there is no higher law. And there is, moreover, no subjective law in man which has a right to resist this slavery in politics, for though the religious element be there, "religion has nothing to do with politics." So nothing must be done or said to oppose the turning of every eighth American into a piece of human money.
But this class of property has one peculiarity which distinguishes it from all other chattels, and that is, it runs away! For, as the fire mounts up, and as the water runs down, obeying the universal gravitation, so man's mind and body hates and abhors bondage, and seeks to escape therefrom; and God has made mankind so that every ​ natural man seeks to aid the victim escaping from torment, to comfort and shelter him. I say every natural man. If a man is "regenerated," after the fashion of Mr. Adams, of this city—not Samuel or John, but the Reverend Nehemiah Adams, who takes a "South Side View of Slavery,"—or of President Lord, of Dartmouth College, who finds Slavery a sacred institution,—if a man is "regenerated" after this sort, he will aid the slave-hunters to the fullest extent, and that with alacrity; but men with natural hearts aid him who flees. These things being so, the property being obnoxious to flight on its own limbs, and able to excite the instinctive sympathy of whoso is most human, the Government, whose great domestic object is the protection of property at home, must eminently protect this property in its special peril. So Government, resisting the great objective law of God, which tends to moralize mankind, must seek to extend and propagate Slavery; must oppose also the special subjective law of humanity which, inclines us to help a man escaping from bondage. And so the Government must pass the Fugitive Slave Bill, and re-kidnap the runaway, remanding him to Slavery, and put the sheltering philanthropist in gaol, and fine him a thousand dollars: thereto it must seek out the vilest men; not only the villains of the gutter, but also the congenital scoundrels of the courts and the parlour, and give them a legal commission to lay their hand on any poor woman, and, if they send her back to Slavery, pay them twice as much as if they declare her free!
That programme of principles was posted all over the land, and re-affirmed by prominent politicians. Whig and Democratic; by two Baltimore conventions of the people, unusually large and "very respectable;" by hundreds of political and commercial editors, North and South; by prominent merchants,—merchant traders and merchant manufacturers,—nine hundred and eighty-seven of "our most eminent citizens" endorsing it all. It was affirmed by judges on the bench, one judge telling the jury that, if there was a doubt in their minds, and a conflict between the law of God and the Fugitive Slave Bill, then they must "obey both;" God upwards and the devil downwards. It was re-affirmed by prominent ministers of all denominations. All these five classes said, "There is no higher ​ law!" "Religion has nothing to do with politics!" "Property is the great object of government!" Some pulpits were silent; a few spoke right out for God and against Atheism; some ministers looked up weeping, others warning, and uttered their words mildly, cautiously, yet with the might which comes from virtue backed by the Eternal. Most of these men had to smart and suffer. Some were driven from their parishes, and the bread taken from their wives' and children's mouths.
The programme of measures met a similar acceptance. Fugitive Slave Bill meetings were held in all the great cities. Faneuil Hall rocked with the giddy genius that screamed and thundered, teaching Atheism to the people; and its walls caught the scoff and scorn and mow of the merchants of Boston and their purchased clerks, hissing at conscience, at God, and the higher law. Ministers in this city affirmed the principle and supported the measures; yea, at Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo, New Haven, Andover,—all over the land. There were exceptional men in all these five classes—I honour them!—but they were very few. Judges, mayors, lawyers, mechanics; truckmen, ministers, merchants, they went for kidnapping. Soldiers were called out in Boston, paid at our cost; volunteers, fifteen hundred strong, agreed to chattelize a man. Twice Boston has endorsed this programme of measures, and twice offered a human sacrifice on this two-homed altar of objective and subjective Atheism. Twice the city of Cotton and Mayhew, the birthplace of Franklin and Samuel Adams, offered a human sacrifice—Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns. Is that the end? There is a to-morrow after to-day; yea, a for ever!
While the nation was in that
"—— rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption,"
it chose a new Administration. Look at them!—the President, the Cabinet, the present Congress, the foreign ministers, the Soules and the Belmonts, and their coadjutors; at the United States judges appointed within four years; the government officers; the marshal's guard, last June! Behold the first fruits of Atheism in politics! Is that ​ all; is it not enough? It is the commencement of the beginning.
Now, in all the frauds which destroy the property of the honesty in the recklessness which dashes away life on railroads of iron, or on the ocean's watery floor, behold the early fruits of the doctrine that there is no higher law; that religion has nothing to do with the most prominent affairs of men; that property, and not persons, is the great object of government! When the prominent men in business, in the State, in the literature, and the Church of America, lay down this dreadful programme of principles; when the nation executes such measures, spreading Slavery over every inch of Federal territory, and arming twenty-one millions of freemen to hunt down and enslave a single poor fugitive; when it plunders Mexico and Hayti, and lusts for Cuba; when a Boston Judge of Probate betrays the wanderer, steals the outcast, and kidnaps a man in our own streets; when the Mayor illegally puts the throat of the town in the hands of a militia colonel, and fills the streets with soldiers armed with the deadliest tools of death, and turns them loose to smite and kill,—and all that to steal a man accused of no crime but the misfortune of his birth, in "Christian" America; when the soldiers of Boston volunteer to desecrate the laws of God—while Nicholas, with his knout, must scourge his Russian serfs to less noble tasks;—while men are appointed "Judges" for services against mankind, for diabolic skill to pervert law to utter wickedness; when a judge of the United States stabs at freedom of speech in Faneuil Hall; when such a judge, using such creatures as appropriate tools of wickedness, seeks such vengeance on men, for such a work; when the Governor of the State compliments the illegal soldiers because they violate the laws which he has hoisted into his seat to enforce and keep; when America would thus exploiter man and God, do you wonder that railroad and steamboat companies exploiter the public, and swindling goes on all round the land! "No higher law!" "Religion nothing to do with politics!" "Property the great object of government!"
The first line of plain reading my mother ever taught toe ran thus:—
​ I hope it has not faded out of the American spelling-books yet; but it is writ plainly on the sky, on the earth: plainer yet in words of fire in my heart. It will be the fast line I shall ever read, as it was the first : I can never get beyond it.
"No man put off the law of God."
At one extreme of society are politicians, ministers, lawyers, mayors, governors, taking a "South Side View" of every popular wickedness, longing for money, office, and fame,—which will be their children's loathed infamy,—teaching practical Atheism as political science, or patriotic duty, or as "our blessed religion." At the other end are ignorant Americans and Irish Catholics—houseless, homeless, heedless, famine-stricken, and ignorant, a bundle of human appetites bound together by a selfish will. These things being so, do you wonder that crime against property and person runs through society; that Irishmen make brawls in the street; that Meigs exploiters San Francisco, and Schuyler New York, and others Boston; that railroads take no heed of life, and steamboats sink three hundred and forty men to the bottom of the sea P Does not the nation exploiter three and a quarter millions of American citizens, and pulpits justify the deed? You can never escape the consequence^ of a first principle.
Dream not that you have seen the end of this obvious wickedness. There will be more "defalcations," great and little; more swindlings, more Schuylers and Meigses. Reap as you sow—of the wind, the whirlwind. Let the present commercial crisis continue, its vortex deepening, its whirl more swift and wide; let employment be more difficult to obtain, winter cruel cold, bread and fuel dear, and labour cheap, will the almighty dollar be safe? The property of the rich will be openly called "a robbery," and plundered from such as honestly earned, and would generously use it. The world has dreadful warnings to offer. "Protection of property the great object of government!" Bottom it on justice—it stands like the continent of Asia; but put it on injustice—what then? It has sometimes happened that an idol came to an end. "Behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ​ ark of the Lord; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him."
The official census gives America about seven thousand millions of dollars. Thirteen hundred millions thereof is vested in the souls of three and a quarter million men! So one-sixth of the nation's property has no natural foundation; rests on no moral law; has no conscience on its side: all religion is against it; all that property is robbery, unnatural property, inhumanly got, also held only by violence. Now the prominent men of both political parties—merchants, manufacturers, politicians, lawyers, scholars, ministers—have declared that this property in men is just as sacred as value in com and cattle; that I may as legally, constitutionally, morally, religiously, own a man, as the pen I write with or the bread I eat ; that when Ellen Craft took her body from her master in Georgia, and fled hither therewith, and appropriated it to her own use, in the eye of the law, the constitution, morality, and religion, she committed an offence just as much as Philip Marrett, when he took the money of the New England Bank and appropriated it to his own use; and that the nation is just as much bound to restore to the Georgian slave-holder the woman who runs away from bondage as to the stockholders' money plundered by the president of the bank; nay, that all who aided in her flight are also robbers, partakers of the felony, and merit punishment. The minister who shelters is a "receiver of stolen goods!" When the million is hungry, will it not one day take such men at their word ? Shall not licentious and expensive clerks, who applauded a minister for his avowal of readiness to send into bondage for ever the mother that bore him; shall not covetous agents of factories, and speculating cashiers and presidents of railroads and banks, say, "It is no worse for me to steal money than for a fugitive slave to leap into freedom! Lawyers and ministers say so. One-sixth of the nation's property is robbery, yet the loudest defended; is it worse for me to steal a few thousand dollars than for America to steal thirteen hundred millions?"
No higher law, is there! So they said in Paris some eighty years ago. "After us the deluge:" it came in their own time. "No higher law! Religion nothing to do with ​ politics!" said the "eminent citizens" of France. "Down with the rich!" "Off with their heads!" "Ours be their money!" That was the amen of the million to that atheistic litany of the "enlightened." Whoso falls on God's justice. shall be broken; "but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder!"
Everywhere is God's law, boundless above me, boundless beneath, every way boundless. The universe is all Bible: matter is Old Testament, man New Testament—revelations from the infinite God. That law—it is man's wisdom to know it; his morality to keep it; his religion to love it and the dear God whose motherly blessing breathes through and in it all. You cannot segregate this Bible from the world of space: you cannot separate a particle of it from the laws of matter. The lesser attraction holds together the cohesive particles of leather, paper, metal, which compose this Bible under my hand; and the greater gravitation binds its attracted mass downwards to the weighty world. Just so is it impossible to separate man, or any one of his faculties, from the great all-encompassing laws of God, the eternal decalogue which He has writ. Break His law, put property above person, the accident before the substance of man, declare that religion has nothing to do with man's chief affairs, and that there is no law above the appetite of the politician and the pimp—and not a life is secure, not a dollar is safe! Subjective Atheism is chaos in you, objective Atheism chaos on the outside; the rich State will end in a ruffianhood of thieves; Democracy turn out a despotism; and its masters will be the "marshal's guard," or the men who make and control such things. The chain which Boston sought to put round the virtuous neck of Ellen Craft seemed short and light: but suddenly it undid its iron coil, and twisted all round the Court House; under it crawled the Judges of the State, and caught its hissing at God's law. Now it seeks to twist about Faneuil Hall and choke the eloquent speech of liberty in her own cradle. The cannon appointed to shoot down the manhood of poor Burns is levelled also at every pulpit where piety dares pray. The hundred festal cannons which Boston "gentlemen"—jubilant at the triumph of their own wickedness—fired to herald the Fugitive Slave Bill, ​ poured hard shot against every honest dollar in the town! Politicians and lower-law divines look forward a great ways—don't they? There is One who seeth the end from the beginnings and by His higher law is it imperishably writ on every soul, "Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not prosper!"
Shall we be warned by what we suffer? No, not yet. The new political party seems likely to adopt the worst principles of the old one. We must suffer much more, I fear, before we learn that, to be great and permanently successful, the nation must be just to all.
"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Four years ago the nation sowed Atheism; see what it reaps in Boston, in New York, and San Francisco, in commercial frauds and peculation, in dashing away human life on the land or on the sea. This is very far from the end,—yet here may the dollar tremble!