Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/267

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254
THE PRESET CRISIS


all this, we are not at all destructive, but eager to create, and patient to preserve. The first thing which a Northern man lays hold of is a working-tool, an axe, or a plough; the last thing he takes in hand is a fighting-tool, a bowie-knife, a rifle: he never touches that till he is driven to the last extremity. He loves to organize productive industry, not war.

So much for the nation North.

Next, there are the Southern States ten millions in population. There also the original germ was Anglo-Saxon, to which additions were made from other stocks, Teutonic and Celtic, though in a smaller degree : France and Spain added more largely to the mixture. But what has most affected the ethnological character of the South is the African element. There are three and a-half millions of men in the Southern States of African origin, whereof half a million are (acknowledged) mulattoes, African Caucasians; but those monumental half-breeds are much more numerous than the census dares confess.

This is not the only human difference between the North and the South. While the Saxons, who originally came to the North, and have since controlled its institutions and ideas, were mainly pilgrims, who, driven by persecution, fled hither for the sake of establishing democracy and Christianity—the foremost people in an age of movement, when revolution shook the whole Teutonic world, bringing the most Christian and democratic institutions and ideas of their age, and developing them to forms still more human and progressive— the settlers of the South were adventurers, who came to America to mend their fortunes, for the sake of money, ease, honour, love of change. Whilst, subsequently, emigrants came from Europe to the North of their own accord, shared the Northern labour and government, partook of its Christianity and democracy, partook of its best influences, and soon mingled their blood in the great stream of Northern population: many persons from Africa were forced to immigrate to the South, and, by legal violence, compelled to more than their share of labour, driven from all share in the government, breaded as inferior, and mingled with the Caucasian population only an illicit lust—which bastardized its own sons and daughters—and were