Part 16

See some proofs of this. There are two ways of getting money; one is by trade, the other is by political office. The pursuit of money, in one or the other of these ways, is the only business reckoned entirely "commendable" and "respectable." There are other callings which are very noble in themselves, and deemed so by mankind; but here they are not thought "commendable" and "respectable," and accordingly you very seldom see young men, born in what is called "the most respectable class of society," engaged in any thing except the pursuit of money by trade or by office. There are exceptions; but the sons of "respectable men," so called, seldom engage in the pursuit of any thing but money by trade or office. This is the chief desire of a majority of the young men of talent, ambition, and education. Even in colleges more respect is paid to money than to genius. The purse is put before the pen. In the churches, wealth is deemed better than goodness or piety. It names towns and colleges; and he is thought the greatest benefactor of a university who endows it with money, not with mind. In giving name to a street in Boston, you call the wealthy end after a rich man, and only the poor end after a man that was good and famous. Money controls the churches. It draws veils of cotton over the pulpit window, to color "the light that cometh from above." As yet the churches are not named after men whose only virtue is metallic, but the recognized pillars of the churches are all pillars of gold. Festus does not tremble before Paul, but Paul before Festus. The pulpit looks down to the pews for its gospel, not up to the eternal God. Is there a rich pro-slavery man in the parish? The minister does not dare read a petition from an oppressed slave asking God that his "unalienable rights" be given him. He does not dare to ask alms for a fugitive. St. Peter is the old patron saint of the Holy Catholic Church. St. Hunker is the new patron saint of the churches of commerce, Catholic and Protestant.

Money controls the law as well as the gospel. The son of a great man and noble is forgotten if the father dies poor; but the mantle of the rich man falls on the son's shoulders. If the son be only half so manly as his sire, and twice as rich, he is sure to be doubly honored. Money supplies defects of character, defects of culture. It is deemed better than education, talent, genius, and character, all put together. Was it not written two thousand years ago in the Proverbs, it "answereth all things?" Look round and see. It does not matter how you get or keep it. "The end justifies the means." Edmund Burke, or somebody else, said "Something must be pardoned to the spirit of liberty." Now it is "Something must be pardoned" to the love of money, nothing "to the spirit of liberty." We find that rich men will move out of town on the last day of April, to avoid taxation on the first day of May. That is nothing. It is very "respectable," very "honorable," indeed! I do not believe that there is any master-carpenter or master-blacksmith in Boston who would not be ashamed to do so. But men of the controlling classes do not hesitate! No matter how you get money. You may rent houses for rum-shops and for brothels; you may make rum, import rum, sell rum, to the ruin of the thousands whom you thereby bring down to the kennel and the almshouse and the jail. If you get money by that, no matter: it is "clean money," however dirtily got.

A merchant can send his ships to sea, and in the slave-trade acquire gold, and live here in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia; and his gold will be good sterling gold, no matter how he got it! In political office, if you are a Senator from California or Oregon, you may draw "constructive mileage," and pay yourself two or three thousand dollars for a journey never made from home, and two or three thousand more back to your home. So you filch thousands of dollars out of the public purse, and you are the "Honorable Senator" just as before. You have got the money, no matter how. You may be a Senator from Massachusetts, and you may take the "trust fund," offered you by the manufacturers of cotton, and be bound as their "retained attorney," by your "retaining fee," and you are still "the Honorable Senator from Massachusetts," not hurt one jot in the eyes of the controlling classes. If you are Secretary of State, you may take forty or fifty thousand dollars from State Street and Wall Street, and suffer no discredit at all. At one end of the Union they will deny the fact as "too atrocious to be believed" at this end they admit it, and say it was "honorable in the people to give it," and "honorable in the Secretary to take it."

"Alas! the small discredit of a bribe Scarce hurts the master, but undoes the scribe."

It would sound a little strange to some people, if we should find that the judges of a court had received forty or fifty thousand dollars from men who were plaintiffs in that Court. You and I would remember that a gift blindeth the eyes of the prudent, how much more of the profligate! But it would be "honorable" in the plaintiffs to give it; "honorable" in the judges to take it!

Hitherto I have called your attention to the proofs of the preponderance of money. I will now point you to signs, which are not exactly proofs, of this immediate worship of money. See these signs in Boston.

When the Old South Church was built, when Christ's Church in Salem Street, when King's Chapel, when Brattle Square Church, they were respectively the costliest buildings in town. They were symbols of religion, as churches always are; symbols of the popular esteem for religion. Out of the poverty of the people, great sums of money were given for these "Houses of God." They said, like David of old, It is a shame that we dwell in a palace of cedars, and the Ark of the Most High remains under the curtains of a tent. How is it now? A crockery shop overlooks the roof-tree of the church where once the eloquence of a Channing enchanted to heaven the worldly hearts of worldly men. Now a hotel looks down on the church which was once all radiant with the sweet piety of a Buckminster. A haberdasher's warehouse overtops the church of the Blessed Trinity; the roof of the shop is almost as tall as the very tower of the church. These things are only symbols. Let us compare Boston, in this respect, with any European city that you can name; let us compare it with gay and frivolous Vienna, the gayest and most frivolous city of all Europe, not setting Paris aside. For though the surface of life in Paris sparkles and glitters all over with radiant and iridescent and dazzling bubbles, empty and ephemeral, yet underneath there flows a stream which comes from the great fountain of nature, and tends on to the ocean of human welfare. No city is more full of deep thought and earnest life. But in Vienna it is not so. Yet even there, above the magnificence of the Herrengasse, above the proud mansions of the Esterhazys and the Schwartzenbergs and the Lichtensteins, above the costly elegance of the imperial palace, St. Stephen's Church lifts its tall spire, and points to God all day long and all the night, a still and silent emblem of a power higher than any mandate of the Kings of earth; ay, to the Infinite God. Men look up to its cross overtowering the frivolous city, and take a lesson! Here, Trade looks down to find the church.

I am glad that the churches are lower than the shops. I have said it many times, and I say it now. I am glad they are less magnificent than our banks and hotels. I am glad that haberdashers' shops look down on them. Let the outward show correspond to the inward fact. If I am pinched and withered by disease, I will not disguise it from you by wrappages of cloth; but I will let you see that I am shrunken and shrivelled to the bone. If the pulpit is no nearer heaven than the tavern-bar, let that fact appear. If the desk in the counting-room is to give law to the desk in the church, do not commit the hypocrisy of putting the pulpit-desk above the counting-room. Let us see where we are.

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The consequence of such causes as are symbolized by these facts must needs appear in our civilization. Men tell us there is no law higher than mercantile! Do you wonder at it? It was said in deeds before words; the architecture of Boston told it before the politicians. Money is the god of our idolatry. Let the fact appear in his temples. Money is master now, all must give way to it,--that to nothing: the church, the State, the law, is not for man, but money.

Let the son of a distinguished man beat a watchman, knowing him to be such, and be brought before a Justice (it would be "levying war" if a mulatto had done so to the marshal); he is bailed off for two hundred dollars. But let a black man have in his pockets a weapon, which the Constitution and laws of Massachusetts provide that any man may have if he please, he is brought to trial and bound over for--two hundred dollars, think you? No! but for six hundred dollars! three times as much as is required of the son of the Secretary of State for assaulting a magistrate![26]

The Secretary of State publicly declared, a short time since, that "The great object of government is the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad." I thank him for teaching us that word! That is the actual principle of the American government.

In all countries of the world, struggles take place for human rights. But in all countries there is a class who desire a privilege for themselves adverse to the rights of mankind: they are commonly richer and abler-minded than the majority of men; they can act in concert. Between them and mankind there is a struggle. The quarrel takes various forms. The contest has been going on for a long time in Europe. There, it is between the aristocracy of birth, and the aristocracy of wealth; for there it is not money, but birth, that makes noble. In this struggle the aristocracy of birth is gradually giving way to the aristocracy of gold. A long and brilliant rent-roll makes up for a short and obscure pedigree.

In that great movement for human freedom which has lasted a thousand years, the city has generally represented Right in its conflict with Might. So, in the middle ages, the city, the home of the trader, of the mechanic, of the intelligent man, was democratic. There freedom got organized in guilds of craftsmen. But the country was the home of the noble and his vassals, the haughty, the ignorant, and the servile. Then the country was aristocratic. It was so in the great struggles between the king and the people in England and France, in Italy and Holland.

In America there is no nobility of birth--it was the people that came over, not monarchy, not aristocracy; they did not emigrate. The son of Guy Fawkes and the son of Charlemagne are on the same level. I know in Boston some of the descendants of Henri Quatre, the greatest king of France. I know also descendants of Thomas Wentworth, "the great Earl of Strafford;" and yet they are now obscure and humble men, although of famous birth. I do not say it should not be so; but such is the fact. Here the controversy is not between distinguished birth and money; it is between money on the one hand, and men on the other; between capital and labor; between usurped privilege and natural right. Here, the cities, as the seat of wealth, are aristocratic; the country, as the seat of labor, is democratic. We may see this in Boston. Almost all the journals in the city are opposed to a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people. Take an example from the free soil movement, which, so far as it goes, is democratic. I am told that of the twenty-one journals in Massachusetts that call themselves "democratic," eighteen favor the free soil movement, more or less; and that the three which do not are all in the cities. The country favors the temperance movement, one of the most democratic of all; for rum is to the aristocracy of gold, what the sword once was to the aristocracy of blood; the castles of the baron, and the rum-shops of the capitalist, are alike fortresses adverse to the welfare of mankind. The temperance movement finds little favor in the cities.

In the country he who works with manly hands is held in esteem; in the city, in contempt. Here laboring men have no political influence, and little confidence in themselves. They have been accustomed to do as they were told,--to do as their "masters" bid.

I call a man a Tory who, for himself or for others, seeks a privilege adverse to the rights of mankind; who puts the accidents of men before the substance of manhood. I may safely say the cities, in the main, are Tory towns; that Boston, in this sense, is a Tory town. They are so, just as in the middle ages the cities were on the other side. This is unavoidable in our form of civilization just now. Accordingly, in all the great cities of the North, slavery is in the ascendant: but, as soon as we get off the pavement, we come upon different ideas; freedom culminates and rises to the meridian.

In America the controlling class in general are superior to the majority in money, in consequent social standing, in energy, in practical political skill, and in intellectual development; in virtue of these qualities, they are the controlling class. But in general they are inferior to the majority of men in justice, in general humanity, and in religion,--in piety and goodness. Respectability is put before Right; Law before Justice; Money before God. With them religion is compliance with a public hearsay and public custom; it is all of religion, but piety and goodness; its chief sacrament is bodily presence in a meeting-house; its only sacrifice, a pew-tax. I know there are exceptions, and honor them all the more for being so very exceptional: they are only enough to show the rule.

In the main, this controlling class governs the land by two instruments: the first is the Public Law; the next is Public Opinion. The law is what was once public opinion, or thought to be; is fixed, written, and supposed to be understood by somebody. Public opinion is not written, and not fixed; but the opinion of the controlling class overrides and interprets the law,--bids or forbids its execution. Public opinion can make or unmake a law; interpret as it chooses, and enforce or forbid its execution as it pleases.

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Such being the case, and such being the chief transient national desire just now, the controlling class consider the State as a machine to help them make money. A great politician, it is said, once laid down this rule,--"Take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor." Perhaps he did not say that, though he did say that "The great object of government is the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad." Such being the case, laws are made accordingly, and institutions are modified accordingly. Let me give an example. In all the towns of New England, town-money is raised by taxes on all the people, and on all the property. The rich man is taxed according to his riches, and the poor man according to his poverty. But the national money is raised by taxation not in proportion to a man's wealth. A bachelor in New England, with a million dollars, pays a much smaller national tax than a carpenter who has no money at all, but only ten children, the poor man's blessing. The mechanic, with a family of twelve, pays more taxes than the Southern planter owning a tract of land as wide as the town of Worcester, with fifteen hundred slaves to till it. This, I say, is not an accident. It is the work of politicians, who know what they are about, and think a blunder is worse than a sin; and, sin as they may, they do not commit such blunders as that.

This controlling class, with their dependents, their vassals, lay and clerical--and they have lay as well as clerical vassals, and more numerous, if less subservient--keep up the institution of slavery. Two hundred years ago, that was the worst institution of Europe. Our fathers, breaking with feudal institutions in general, did not break with this: they brought it over here. But when the nation, aroused for its hour of trial, rose up to its great Act of Prayer, and prayed the Declaration of Independence, all the nation said "Amen" to the great American idea therein set forth. Every Northern State reaffirms the doctrine that "All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But in spite of this, and of the consciousness that it is true, while the Northern States have cast out this institution, the Southern States have kept it. The nation has adopted, extended, and fostered it. This has been done, notwithstanding the expectation of the people in 1787 that it would soon end. It has been done against the design of the Constitution, which was "to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty;" against the idea of America, that "All men have an equal and unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" against all religion, all humanity, all right, ay, and against the conscience of a majority of the people.

Well, a law was passed last September, that would have been atrocious two hundred years ago: you all know it. I have no words to describe it by. For the last two hundred years, the English race has not invented an adjective adequate to describe it. The English language is used up and broken down by any attempt to describe it. That law was not the desire of the people; and, could the nation have been polled North and South, three fourths would have said "No!" to the passage of that law. It was not passed to obtain the value of the slaves escaped, for in seven months twenty slaves have not been returned! It was not a measure looking to legal results, but it was a political measure, looking to political results: what those results will be we shall see in due time.

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In America the controlling class is divided into two great parties: one is the Slave Power in the States of the South; the other is the Money Power in the cities of the North. There are exceptional men in both divisions--men that own slaves, and yet love freedom and hate slavery. There are rich men in Northern cities who do the same; all honor to them. But in general it is not so; nay, it is quite otherwise. They are hostile to the great idea of America. Let me speak with the nicety of theological speech. These two divisions are two "Persons" in one "Power;" there is only one "Nature" in both, one "Will." If not the same nature, it is a like nature: Homoi-ousia, if not Homo-ousia! The Fugitive Slave Law was the act of the two "Persons," representing the same "Nature," and the same "Will." It was the result of a union of the Slave Power of the South with the Money Power of the North: the Philistines and the Hebrews ploughed with the same heifer.

There is sometimes an excuse or a palliation for a wicked deed. There was something like one for the "Gag Law," the "Alien and Sedition Law," although there is no valid excuse for either of these laws, none to screen their author from deserved reproach. There is no excuse for the Fugitive Slave Law; there was no occasion for it.

You all know how it was brought about; you remember the speech of Mr. Webster on the 7th of March, 1850, a day set apart for the blessed Martyrs, Saints Perpetua and Felicitas. We all know who was the author of that law. It is Mr. Webster's Fugitive Slave Law! It was his "thunder," unquestioned and unquestionable. You know what a rapid change was wrought in the public opinion of the controlling classes, soon after its passage. First the leading whigs went over. I will not say they changed their principles, God knows, not I, what principles they have, I will only say they altered their "resolutions," and ate their own words. True, the whigs have not all gone over. There are a few who still cling to the old Whig-tree, after it has been shaken and shaken, and thrashed and thrashed, and brushed and brushed, by politicians, as apple-trees in autumn. There are still a few little apples left, small and withered no doubt, and not daring to show their dishonored heads just now, but still containing some precious seeds that may do service by and by. Whig journal after journal went over; politician after politician "caved in" and collapsed. At the sounding of the rams' horns of slavery, how quick the Whig Jericho went down! Its fortresses of paper resolutions rolled up and blew away. Of course, men changed only after "logical conviction." Of course, nobody expected a "reward" for the change, at least only in the world to come. Were they not all Christians? True, on the 17th of June last, seventy-five years after the battle of Bunker Hill, Mr. Webster said in the Senate, that if the North should vote for the Fugitive Slave Bill, a Tariff was expected. But that was of no moment, no more than worldly riches to "the elect." Of course, a man has a right to change his opinions every ten minutes, if he has a good and sufficient reason. Of course, these men expected no offices under this or any future President! But presently the Fugitive Slave Law became a Whig doctrine, a test of party fidelity and fitness for office!

You all remember the "Union" meeting in Boston. On that occasion, democrats "of the worst kind" suddenly became "respectable." The very democratic prince of devils was thought to be as good a "gentleman" as any in the city.

It was curious to see the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law on the democratic party. Democrat after democrat "caved in;" journal after journal went over; horse, foot, and dragoons, they went over. The Democratic party North, and American Slavery South, have long been accustomed to accommodate themselves with the same nag after the old fashion of "ride and tye." In the cities, democrats went over in tribes; entire Democratic Zabulons and Nephthalims, whole Galilees of Democratic Gentiles, all at once saw great Whig light; and to them that sat in the shadow of Freedom, Slavery sprung up.

That portion of the Whig party which did not submit, became as meek, ay, became meeker even than the beast which the old prophet in the fable is alleged to have ridden; for, though beaten again and again,--because alarmed at seeing the angel of Freedom that bars the way before the great Whig Balaam, who has been bidden by his master to go forth and curse the people of the Lord,--it dares not open its mouth and say, "What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?"

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But when such a law is hostile to the feelings of a majority of the people, to their conscience and their religion, how shall we get the law executed? That is a hard matter. In Russia and in Austria it would be very easy. Russia has an army five hundred or eight hundred thousand strong; and that army is ready. But here there is no such army. True, the President asked Congress to give him greater power, and the answer came from the Slave party South, not from the Money party North, "No! you have more now than you know how to use." Failing in this attempt, what was to be done that the law might be executed? Two things must be done: A false idea must persuade the people to allow it to be done; Base men must be found to do it. A word upon each point.

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