Additional Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons

well knowing their peril. How often must I protect my own parishioners from the clutch of men seeking to enslave them! What scorn has been visited on me in consequence! Four years ago, a wealthy and prominent merchant of Boston declared to his fellows that if any men would assassinate Mr. Phillips and myself, and he were called as a Grand Juror to pass upon the act, he should "declare it a justifiable homicide!"

In such a time no man's liberty is safe; - nay, the nation itself is brought into imminent peril, into worse dangers than War ever thundered upon our fathers' honored heads. In the last five years, it has often seemed as if our Republican Ship must perish, and this Democracy, like so many others, be whelmed under in the great deep of Despotism which has successively swallowed down so many liberal-minded and fair States. But such is my certainty of the ultimate triumph of the great Truths now fluttering about the consciousness of this generation, and such my confidence in the mass of the American People in the Northern States, that I cannot yet give over my fairest, dearest earthly hope- womanly and romantic though it seems. Else I should long since have left that little company of noble men and women who toil for the liberation of America, and are hitherto honored chiefly with the scorn of the controlling classes in this town; and should have returned from public wrangling to silent study Science, Philosophy, Letters. But with such trust in the American People, I have devoted what powers I possess to the practical duties of the day: yet hoping in better times to see my cherished bud bloom into some well-proportioned flower. In the last few years I could work at my favorite task only by snatches-learn a few

languages, collect books, and gather facts therefrom, or in the swift walks of a minister's practical business, in nocturnal railroad journeys, or other sleepless nights in stranger's houses, meditate the plan of the intended work. How long this will continue I know not, -only fear.

These two volumes contain some of the published results of those labors of the last few years. Some of the speeches were purely extemporaneous; for some 'others I had but the briefest time for composition. All but the opening article of each volume are reprinted from phonographic reports taken by my friends, whose kindness moves them thus to daguerreotype all my Sunday sermons. The brief speech before the Ministerial Conference I wrote down a few days after its delivery, and have marked with brackets [] the words since added: the "Thoughts on the Progress of America," was never delivered, for the terrible events of that period kept me in the court house during the session of the Convention. If any reader will compare the date of any Sermon or Speech, in these volumes with that of the occasion thereof, he will see that often very little time was left for the nicety of a work of art. But there was no special reason why the Sermon of Old Age, should have been delivered at the time it was preached, having no reference to any special occasion. I put it at the end of the last volume as a fitting termination of the book, as one day it may be of the reader's, or the writer's life.

Perhaps I ought also to say that, pressed with other duties, I write this Preface in the presence of the Circuit Court of the United States, before which I am now arraigned as a Malefactor, charged with a "Misdemeanor,"

committed by speaking, in Faneuil Hall and elsewhere, a few words against the kidnapping of my fellow-citizens of Boston, some of them also my own parishioners; and that the same man who so zealously supported the fugitive slave bill, and labored by its instrumentality to enslave men, is at this moment on the Bench to try me for resisting with a word the officer who sought to reduce a Boston man to the condition of a Virginia Slave.

BOSTON, U. S. Circuit Court Room,

April 3, 1855.

THEODORE PARKER.