therefore, not quite so easy to say what is the chief desire of the
people; but, if I understand American history, this desire is the Love
of Individual Liberty. Nothing has been so marked in our history as
this. We are consciously, in part, yet still more unconsciously, aiming
at democracy,--at a government of all the people, by all the people, and
for the sake of all the people. Of course that must be a government by
the higher law of God, by the Eternal Justice to which you and I and all
of us owe reverence. We all love freedom for ourselves; one day we shall
love it for every man,--for the tawny Indian and the sable Negro, as
much as for you and me. This love of freedom has appeared in the ideas
of New England,--and New England was once America; it was once the soul,
although not the body of America. It appeared in its political action
and its ecclesiastical action, in the State and in the church, and in
all the little towns. In general, every change in the constitution of a
free State makes it more democratic; every change in local law is for
democracy, not against it. We have broken with the old feudal
tradition,--broken forever with that. I think this love of individual
liberty is the specific desire of the people. If we are proud of any
thing, it is of our free institutions. I know there are men who are
prouder of wealth than of any thing else: by and by I shall have a word
to say of them. But in Massachusetts, New England, in the North, if we
should appeal to the great body of the people, and "poll the house," and
ask of all what they were proudest of, they would not say, of our
cattle, or cotton, or corn, or cloth; but it is of our freedom, of our
men and women. Leaving out of the calculation the abounding class, which
is corrupt everywhere, and the perishing class, which is the vassal as
it is the creature of the abounding class, and as corrupt and selfish
here as everywhere, we shall find that seven-eighths of the people of
New England are eminently desirous of this one thing. This desire will
carry the day in any fifty years to come, as it has done in two hundred
and fifty years past. The great political names of our history are all
on its side: Washington, the Adamses--both of them, God bless
them!--Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, these were all friends of liberty. I
know the exceptions in the history of some of these men, and do not deny
them. Other American names, dear to the people, are of the same stamp.
The national literature, so far as we have any national literature, is
democratic. I know there is what passes for American literature, because
it grows on American soil, but which is just as far from being
indigenous to America as the orange is from being indigenous to Cape
Cod. This literature is a poor, miserable imitation of the feudal
literature of old Europe. Perhaps it is now the prominent literature of
the time. One day America will take it and cast it out from her. The
true American literature is very poor, is very weak, is almost miserable
now; but it has one redeeming quality,--it is true to freedom, it is
true to democracy.
In the Revolution this desire of the nation was prominent, and came to
consciousness. It was the desire of the most eminent champions of
liberty. At one time in the history of the nation, the platform of
speakers was in advance of the floor that was covered by the people at
large, because at that time the speakers became conscious of the idea
which possessed the hearts of the people. That is the reason why John
Hancock, the two Adamses, and Jefferson, came into great prominence
before the people. They were more the people than the people themselves;
more democratic than the democrats. I know, and I think it must be quite
plain in our history, that this has been the chief desire of the people.
If so, it determines our political destination.
However, with nations as with men, there are exceptional desires; one of
which, with the American nation at present, is the desire for wealth.
Just now, that is the most obvious and preponderate desire in the
consciousness of the people. It has increased surprisingly in fifty
years. It is the special, the chief desire of the controlling class. By
the controlling class, I mean what are commonly called "our first men."
I admit exceptions, and state the general rule. With them every thing
gives way to money, and money gives way to nothing, neither to man nor
to God.
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.