Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
is declared contraband, for the merchant-slave-breeders want a monopoly.
This same preference of money over men appears in many special statutes.
In most of our manufacturing companies the capital is divided into
shares so large that a poor man cannot invest therein! This could easily
be avoided. A man steals a candlestick out of a church, and goes to the
State Prison for a year and a day. Another quarrels with a man, maims
him for life, and is sent to the common jail for six months. A bounty is
paid, or was until lately, on every gallon of intoxicating drink
manufactured here and sent out of the country. If we begin with taking
care of the rights of man, it seems easy to take care of the rights of
labor and of capital. To begin the other way is quite another thing. A
nation making laws for the nation is a noble sight. The Government of
all, by all, and for all, is a democracy. When that Government follows
the eternal laws of God, it is founding what Christ called the kingdom
of heaven. But the predominating class making laws not for the nation's
good, but only for its own, is a sad spectacle; no reasoning can make
it other than a sorry sight. To see able men prostituting their talents
to such a work, that is one of the saddest sights! I know all other
nations have set us the example, yet it is painful to see it followed,
and here.
Our politics, being mainly controlled by this class, are chiefly
mercantile, the politics of peddlers. So political management often
becomes a trick. Hence we have many politicians, and raise a harvest of
them every year, that crop never failing, party-men who can legislate
for a class; but we have scarce one great statesman who can step before
his class, beyond his age, and legislate for a whole nation, leading the
people and giving us new ideas to incarnate in the multitude, his word
becoming flesh. We have not planters, but trimmers! A great statesman
never came of mercantile politics, only of politics considered as the
national application of religion to life. Our political morals, you all
know what they are, the morals of a huckster. This is no new thing; the
same game was played long ago in Venice, Pisa, Florence, and the result
is well known. A merely mercantile politician is very sharp-sighted and
perhaps far-sighted, but a dollar will cover the whole field of his
vision and he can never see through it. The number of slaves in the
United States is considerably greater than our whole population when we
declared Independence, yet how much talk will a tariff make, or a
public dinner; how little the welfare of three million men! Said I not
truly, our most famous politicians are, in the general way, only
mercantile party-men? Which of these men has shown the most interest in
those three million slaves? The man who in the Senate of a Christian
Republic valued them at twelve hundred million dollars! Shall
respectable men say, "We do not care what sort of a Government the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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