Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/266

and New England, was once America; it was once the soul, although not tho body of America. It appeared in in political action and its ecclesiastical action, in the State and in the church, and in all tho 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 tho old feudal tradition,—broken for over with that. I think this love of individual liberty is tho specific desire of the people. If we are proud or anything, it is of our free institutions. I know there are men who are prouder of wealth than of anything else: by and by I shall have a word to say of thorn. 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 or 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.