teristic manufacture of his town on the wharves of a
Mahometan city. I suppose there are not ten ministers in
Boston who would not "get into trouble," as the phrase is, if they were to preach against intemperance, and the
causes that produce intemperance, with half so much zeal
as they innocently preach "regeneration" and o "form of
piety" which will never touch a single corner of the earth. As the minister came down, the spirit of trade would meet him on the pulpit stairs to warn him: "Business is business; religion is religion; business is ours, religion yours: but if you make or even allow religion to interfere with our business, then it will be tho worse for you—that is all!" You know it is not a great while since we drove out of Boston the one Unitarian minister who was a fearless apostle of temperance.[1] His presence here was a grief to that "form of piety;" a disturbance to trade. Since then the peace of the churches has not been much disturbed by the preaching of temperance. The effect has been salutary; no Unitarian minister has risen up to fill that place!
This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact, that tho merchants of Boston still allow coloured seamen to he, taken from their ships and shut up in the gaols of another State. If they cared as much for the rights of man as for money, as much for the men who sail the ship as for the cargo it carries, I cannot think there would be brass enough in South Carolina, or all the South, to hold another freeman of Massachusetts in bondage, merely for the colour of his skin. No doubt, a merchant would lose his reputation in this city by engaging directly in the slave trade, for it is made piracy by the law of the land.[2] But did any one ever lose his reputation by taking a mortgage on slaves as security for a debt; by becoming, in that way, or by inheritance, the owner of slaves, and still keening them in bondage?
You shall tcke the whole trading community of Boston,
- ↑ Rev. John Pierpont.
- ↑ This statement was made in 1849; subsequent events have shown that I was mistaken. It is now thought respectable and patriotic not only to engage in the slave trade, bat to kidnap men and women in Boston. Host of the prominent newspapers, and several of the most prominent clergy, defend the kidnapping. Attempts have repeatedly been made to kidnap my own parishioners. Kidnapping is not even a matter of church discipline in Boston in 1851.
