Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/17

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4
THOUGHTS ON AMERICA.


to administer the organization. This power is one which contributes greatly to both their commercial and political success. But this tribe is also most eminently material in its aims and means ; it loves riches, works for riches, fights for riches. It is not warlike, as some other nations, who love war for. its own sake, though a hard fighter when put to it.

5. We are the most aggressive, invasive, and exclusive people on the earth. The history of the Anglo-Saxon, for the last three hundred years, has been one of continual aggression, inyasion, and exteUination.

I cannot now stop to dwell on these traits of our tribal anthropology, but must yet say a word touching this national exclusiveness and tendency to exterminate.

Austria and Russia never treated a conquered nation so cruelly as England has treated Ireland. Not many years ago, four-fifths of the population of the island were Catholics, a tenth Anglican churchmen. All offices were in the hands of the little minority. Two-thirds of the Irish House of Commons were nominees of the Protestant gentry ; the Catholic members must take the declaration against Transubstantiation. Papists were forbidden to vote in elections of members to the Irish Parliament. They suffered "under a universal, unmitigated, indispensable, exceptionless disqualification." "In the courts of law, they could not gain a place on the bench, nor act as a barrister, attorney, or solicitor, nor be employed even as a hired clerk, nor sit on a grand jury, nor serve as a sheriff, nor hold even the lowest civil office of trust and profit; nor have any privilege in a town corporation ; nor be a freeman of. such corporation ; nor vote at a vestry,"[1] A Catholic could not marry a Protestant: the priest who should celebrate such a marriage was to be hanged. He could not be " a guardian to any child, nor educate his own child, if its mother were a Protestant," or the child declared in favour of Protestantism. "No Protestant might instruct a Papist. Papists could not supply their want by academies and schools of their own ; for a Catholic to teach, even in a private family, or as usher to a Protestant, was a felony, punishable by imprisonment, exile, or death." " To be educated in any foreign Catholic school

  1. Bancroft, History of United States, vol. v. p. 66, et seq.