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.