Part 2

These two radical theories of man--man, a physical creature to be judged by effects produced in Time; or man, a spiritual creature, to be judged by the development to which he is destined, are at the root of all the antagonisms between the spirit of northern and southern institutions: northern policy and southern policy. In the North, it is the public sentiment of the people, that all men are born free and equal; that every man has an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, forfeited only by _crime_. The North believe that personal and political liberty are not only _rights_ of man, but their _necessity_, that man cannot thrive nor develop, with the true proportions of manhood, without liberty. It is the northern sentiment that a man must be prepared for liberty, and that the act of _birth_ is that preparation; that no creature lives which is the better for oppression, and who will not be the better for freedom, which is the natural air appointed for the soul's breathing. The North disdains every pretense that men are injured by sudden liberty. A famished man may injure himself by over-feeding; but that is an argument not against food, but against famine. It is the northern sentiment, and justly deduced from the Christian theory of man, that society should redeem all its own children from ignorance, should secure their growth, equip them for citizenship, make all the influences of society enure to the benefit of the mass of men. The southern sentiment is the reverse of this. It holds that all men are not born free and equal; that men have not an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and that men are not in their very constitution fitted for liberty, and benefited by it. They hold that liberty is an attribute of power; that it is a blossom which belongs to _races_, and not to mankind; that a part were born to rule, and a part were ordained to serve; that liberty is dangerous to the many; that servitude, the most rigorous, is a blessing; that it accords with the creative intent of God, and with his revealed institutions; that a nation cannot be homogeneous, and should not aim at it; that there is a law and scale of gradation, on which the top is privilege and authority, the bottom labor and obedience. _These are the radical theories of the respective sections of the land._ Men often are profoundly ignorant of the principles which control their policy, as a ship is unconscious of the rudder that steers her. Many are found, both North and South, whose conduct over-rules their theory, and who are better or worse than their belief. There are southern men who are more generous than their theory, and there are northern men who are grossly untrue to the northern theory, which, with their lips, they profess. There are southern men with northern consciences, and there are northern men with southern consciences. But, in the main, these respective theories reign and regulate public procedure. There is not a man so poor in the North, or so ignorant, or souseless, as not to be regarded as a Man, by religion, by civil law, and by public opinion. Selfishness and pride, avarice and cunning, anger or lust, may prey upon the heedlessness or helplessness of many. Society may be full of evils. But all these things are not sequences of northern doctrines, but violations of them. If sharks in great cities consume the too credulous emigrant; if usurers, like moths, cut the fabric of life with invisible teeth; if landlords sack their tenements and pinch the tenant--all these results are against the spirit of our law, against public feeling, and they that do such things must slink and burrow. They are vermin that run in the walls, and peep from hiding-holes, and we set traps for them as we do for rats or weazels. But, in the South, the subordination of man, to man, in his earnings, his skill, his time and labor--in his person, his affections, his very children--is a part of the theory of society, drawn out into explicit statutory law, coincident with public opinion, and executed without secrecy. A net spread for those guilty of such wrongs against man, would catch States, and Legislatures, Citizens, Courts, and Constitutions.

In the North the most useless pauper that burdens the Alms-House--the most uncombed foreigner that delves in a ditch--the most abject creature that begs a morsel from door to door, _is yet a man_; and there is, not in theory only, but in the public sentiment, a sacredness of rights, which no man, except by stealth, can violate with impunity. There is no other law for the Governor of New-York or of Massachusetts, than for the beggar in your streets. That which protects the dwelling and the property of the rich man, belongs just as much to the hovel of the beggar. God sends but one sun, and it is the same light that kindles against the roof of a mansion, that dawns upon the thatch of a hut. The same air comes to each, the same showers, the same seasons, summer and winter. And as is Nature, so in the North, is law, and the distributive benefits of society. They bathe society from top to bottom! The rich, the learned, the refined, the strong, may know how to make a better use of the air, but they have no more air of privilege to breathe, than the poorest wretch.

In the South, exactly the reverse is true, not by stealth, not by neglect of a recognized principle, but as the result of men's ideas, and by organized arrangements. Touch a hireling's wages, in the North, and the Law stands to defend him and beat you down! Take the laborer's wages in the South, and the law stands to defend you, and beat him down.

Beat a man, in the North, for a private wrong done, and the law will strike you. But in the South, it is the right of the white, unquestioned and unquestionable to beat every third person in the community.

Let the proudest mill-owner break but the skin of the poorest operative in Lowell or Lawrence, and both law and public sentiment, alike, would grasp and punish him!

But in the South the law refuses to look at any degree of cruelty in chastisements upon the universal laborer, short of maiming or death, and public sentiment is but little better than the law.

The laborer in the North answers to a tribunal; in the South, to a master, incensed, passionate, vindictive in justice executed upon all symptoms of resisting manhood!

In the North, nothing is more sacred than a man's family and his children. It would not be possible for a man to do public violence to a family circle without vindictive penalty. Let him separate a mother from her daughters, let him employ a hireling ruffian to carry off the boys into the country and parcel them out there--let him scatter the flock, and leave the children motherless, and the parents childless, and what do you think would become of _him_?

In the South it is a part of the civil rights of men to do these things whenever they please. And though public sentiment is better than law, yet as no public sentiment on earth is a match for legalized lust, or avarice, or the grip of misfortune, these things are continually done, and remorselessly. Cruelty, chastity, virtue, do not mean the same things in the South as in the North. A man is not blemished by deeds and indulgencies, upon a plantation, among slaves, which in the North, would strike him through with infamy and house him in the penitentiary.

In the South, there are many roads leading from the top of society to the bottom, but not _one_, not ONE from the bottom to the top.

In the North, if the citizen chooses to walk in it, _there is a road from every man's door_ up to the Governor's chair or the Presidential seat!

It needs no words, now, to convince you, that out of such different theories of men, there will exist in the North and in the South, extremely different ideas of Society, Government, and Public Policy.

In the North, first in order of consideration is man, the individual man; next the family, made of those of common blood, and by far the strongest, as it is the most sacred of all institutions. Then comes the township, which presents the only spectacle of an absolute political democracy. For, here only, do citizens assemble in mass and vote, directly and not by representation. Next comes Society at large, or the mass of citizens grouped into States. And in Society, in the North, there are no classes except such as rise out of spontaneous forces. Wealth, experience, ability set men above their fellows. There they stand as long as there is a _real_ superiority. But they stand there, not by legal force, nor to exercise any legal power, or to have one single privilege or prerogative, which does not belong just as much to every citizen clear down to the bottom. All that a class _means_ in the North is, that when men have shown themselves strong and wise men give them honor for it. Death levels it all down again. Their children inherit nothing. They must earn for themselves. There is no division of society into orders, by which some have privilege and some have not, some have opportunity and advantages which others have not.

In the South, society is divided into two great and prominent classes--the ruling and the obeying--the thinking and the working. The labor of the South is performed by three million creatures who represent the heathen idea of man.

All the benefits that have accrued to man from Christianity, are appropriated and monopolized by the white population.

Here is a seam that no sophistry can sew up. Here is a society organized, not on an idea of equal rights, and of inequalities only as they spring from difference of worth, but on an idea of permanent, political, organized inequality among men. They carry it so far that the theory of Slave law regards the slave not as an inferior man, governed, for his own good as well as for the benefit of the society at large, but it pronounces him, in reiterated forms, not a man at all, but a chattel.

When a community of States, by the most potential voice of Law, says to the whole body of its laboring population, Ye are not _men_ and shall not be; ye are chattels--it is absurd to speak about kind treatment--about happiness. It is about cattle that they are talking! Our vast body of laboring men do not yet feel the force of such a theory of human society. But, if that political system, which has openly been making such prodigious strides for the last fifty years, and effecting, secretly, a yet greater change in men's ideas of society and government, shall gain complete ascendancy, they, in their turn, and in due time will know and see the difference between a Republican Democracy and a Republican Aristocracy?

Out of such original and radical differences, there must flow a perpetual contrast and opposition of policies and procedures, in the operation of society and of business. We will select but a few, of many, subjects of contrast, Work, Education, Freedom of Speech and of the Press, and Religion.

I. WORK. Among us, and from the beginning, Work has been honorable. It has been honorable to dig, to hew, to build, to reap, to wield the hammer at the forge, and the saw at the bench. It has been honorable because our people have been taught that each man is set to make the most of himself. The crown for every victory gained in a struggle of skill or industry over matter is placed upon the soul; and thus among a free people industry becomes education.

It is the peculiarity of Northern labor, that it _thinks_. It is intelligence working out through the hands. There is more real thought in a Yankee's hand than in a Southerner's head. This is not true of a class, or of single individuals, or of single States. It pervades the air. It is Northern public sentiment. It springs from our ideas of manhood. These influences, acting through generations, have been wrought into the very blood. It is in the stock. Go where you will a Yankee is a working creature. He is the honeybee of mankind. Only Work is royal among us. It carries the sceptre, and changes all nations by its touch, opening its treasures and disclosing its secrets.

But with all this industry, you shall find nowhere on earth so little _drudging_ work as in the North. It is not the servitude of the hands to material nature. It is the glorious exercise of mind upon nature. They vex nature with incessant importunities. They are always prying, and thinking, and trying.

In California, gold is found in quartz formations. But in New England, and the free inventive North, in the geology of industry, gold is found everywhere--in rye straw and bonnets, in leather and stone, in wool, felts and cloths; in wood, in stone, and in very ice. It is wrapped up in the beggar's raiment, which unroll in our mills into paper--yesterday, a beggar's feculent rags; to-day, a newspaper, conveying the world's daily life into twenty thousand families. And so great are the achievements of labor that everybody honors it. It stands among us as an invisible dignity. Four spirits there are that rule in New England--religion, social virtue, intelligence, and _work_; and this last takes something from them all, and is their physical exponent. So that not only is work honored and honorable, but the want of it is an implied discredit. The presumption is always against a man who does not labor.

In the South, the very reverse is true, as a general proposition.

It is true, because labor is the peculiar badge of Slavery. It does not stand, as with us, a symbol of intelligence, but a symbol of stupid servitude. It is the business of those whom the law puts out of the pale of society and accounts chattels, and who, by the opinion of society, are at the bottom, and under the feet of respectable men. To work is, therefore, _prima facie_ evidence of degradation. It is ranking oneself with a slave by doing a slave's tasks; as eating a beggar's crust with him would be a beggar's fellowship.

But this is not the whole reason, nor the chiefest and more potent reason of the difference between public feeling about WORK, North and South.

The ideas of men in the South do not inspire any such tendency. Men are judged there not by what they are and are to be, but by what they _can now do_. Only such things as have an echo in them, that reverberate in the ear of public opinion, that produce an effect of notice, honor, advancement _in the_ OPINIONS of men, are relished. In the North, men are educated to _be_ something--in the South to _seem_ something. The North tends to _doing_--the South to _appearing_. And both tendencies spring from the root of opposite theories of men and notions of society.

And it is this innate, hereditary indisposition to work that, after all, is the greatest obstacle to emancipation. Laziness in the South and money in the North, are the bulwarks of Slavery! To take away a planter's slaves is to cut off his hands. There is where he keeps his work. There is none of it in himself. And it is this, too, which leads to the contempt which southern people feel for northern men. They are working men, and work is flavored to the Southerner with ideas of ignominy, of meanness, of vulgar lowness. Neither can they understand how a man who works all his life long can be high-minded and generous, intelligent and refined.

Not only is there this contrast in dignity of work, but even more--_in rights of industry_. Work, in the North, has responsibilities that are prodigious educators. We ordain that a man shall have the fullest chance, and then he shall have the results of his activity. He shall take all he can make, or he shall take the whole result of _indolence_. It is a double education. It inspires labor by hope of fruition, and intensifies it by the fear of non-fruition. The South have their whole body of laborers at work without either responsibility. They cut it off at both ends. They virtually say to the slave, in reality, "_Be lazy_, for all that you earn shall do you no good; be lazy, for when you are old and helpless we are bound to take care of you."

It is this apparent care for the helplessness of slaves, that has won the favor of many northern men, and of some who ought to have known better the effect of taking off from men the responsibility of labor, in both ways, its fruition and its penalty. Once declare in New York that Government would take care of poverty and old age, so as to make it honorable, and it would be a premium upon improvidence. With us, it is expected that every man will work, will earn, will lay up, will deliver his family from public charity. There is, to be sure, an Alms House to catch all who, by misfortune or improvidence, fall through. But such is the public opinion in favor of personal independence springing from industry, that a native-born American citizen had rather die than go to an Alms-House. Foreigners are our staple paupers. Our charity feeds the poor wretches whom foreign slavery has crippled and cast upon us. But the whole South is a vast work-house for the slave while young, and a vast alms-house for him when old, and neither young or old, is he permitted to feel the responsibility for labor. And this, too, explains the _apparent_ advantage which the South has over the North in the matter of pauperism and distress. The northern system intends to punish those who will not work. It it not a system calculated for slaves nor for lazy men. If indolence comes under it, it will take the penalty of not working. And nowhere else in the world is the penalty of indolence, and even of shiftlessness, so terrible as in the North, as nowhere else is the remuneration of a virtuous industry so ample and so widely diffused.

II. There is just as marked a contrast upon the subject of education, and especially of Common Schools. In the North we have COMMON Schools. This is more than a School. It is more than a public school. It is a _Common_ School, in distinction from a _select_, or class school. It is a public provision for bringing together, upon a perfect equality, the children of the rich and the poor, the noble and ignoble, the high and the low. It is a provision of our institutions, by which every generation is led to a line and made to start equal and together. There will be inequality enough as soon as men get into life. Some shoot ahead; some, like dull sailors in a fleet, are dropped behind, and men are scattered all along the ocean. But the _Common_ School gathers up their children and brings them all back again to take a new start together. Thus our schools are not mere whetstones to the intellect; they are institutions for evening up society; they resist the tendency to separation into classes, which grows with the prosperity of a community; they bind together, in cordial sympathy, all classes of citizens. For nothing is more tenacious than schoolday remembrances, and the last things that we forget are playmates and schoolmates.

The South may have schools. But never _Common_ Schools. The South has no _common_ people. There can be States, there, but never _Commonwealths_. There is no _common_ ground, where the theory of society grades men upon a perpendicular scale. It is a society of _classes_, and a society of _classes_ can never be a _community_. When the whole labor of a State is performed by a degraded class, that are not included in the State as citizens or social beings, it is impossible but that the class next above them should feel the force of those theories and ideas which have produced such a state of things. It is so. The poor white population of the South is degraded. They are ignorant--they are not fertile in thought or labor. They are not so low as the slaves, nor so high as those who own slaves. There are three classes--the top, the middle, and the bottom; and two of these, the top and bottom, being fixed and legal, the middle is modified by them both.

In such a Society, there cannot be a _Common School_, in any such sense as we mean it. Indeed, there cannot be _general education_ in any State where ignorance is the legal condition of one-half the population, as is the case in many Southern States. Ignorance is an institution in the South. It is a political necessity. It is as much provided for by legislation and by public sentiment, and guarded by enactments, as intelligence is in the North. It must be. The restrictions which keep it from the slave will keep it from the whites, excepting, always, the few who live at the top. There cannot be an atmosphere of intelligence. Slaves would be in danger of breathing that. There cannot be a common public sentiment, a common school, nor common education. Knowledge is power, not only, but powder, putting the South in the risk of being blown up, by careless handling and too great abundance.

III. Closely connected with this, and springing from the same causes, is a contrast between the North and the South, in respect to free speech and open discussion by lip and by type.

The theory of the North is, that every man has the right, on every subject, to the freest expression of his opinions, and the fullest right to urge them upon the convictions of others. It is not a permission of law; it is the inherent right of the individual. Law is only to protect the citizen in the use of that right.

It is the theory of the North that society is as much a gainer by this freedom of discussion as is the individual.

It is a perpetual education of the people, and a safeguard to the State. There is the utmost latitude of speech and discussion among our citizens. The attempt to abridge it would be so infatuated that the most dignified Court that ever sat in Boston would become an object of universal merriment and ridicule, that should presume to arrest and cause to be indicted any man for free speaking in old Faneuil Hall. Merriment, I say, for who would not laugh at a philosopher who would set snares for the stars, and fix his net to catch the sun, and regulate their indiscreet shining. Darkness and silence are excellent for knaves and tyrants; but the attempt to command the one or the other in the North, changes the knave to an imbecile and the tyrant to a fool.

But should any power, against the precedents of the past, the spirit of our people, the theory of our civil polity and the rights of individual man succeed, and make headway against free speech, and put it in jeopardy, it would convulse the very frame-work of society. There would be no time for a revolution--there would be an _eruption_, and fragmentary Judges, Courts and their minions would fly upward athwart the sky, like stones and balls of flame driven from the vomiting crater of a furious volcano! No. This is a right like the right of breathing. This is a liberty that broods upon us like the atmosphere. The grand American doctrine that men may speak what they think, and may print what they speak--that all public measures shall have free public discussion--cannot be shaken; and any party must be intensely American that can afford to destroy the very foundation of American principle that public questions shall be publicly discussed, and public procedure be publicly agreed upon. Right always gains in the light, and Wrong in the dark. An owl can whip an eagle in the night!

The South, holding a heathen theory of man--an aristocratic theory of society,--is bound to hold, and does hold, a radically opposite practice in respect to rights of speech and freedom of the press.

There is not freedom of opinion in the South and there cannot be.

Men may there talk of a thousand things--of all religious doctrines, of literature, of art, of public political measures--but no man has liberty to talk as he pleases about the structure of southern society, and apply to the real facts of southern life and southern internal questions that searching investigation and public exposure which, in the North, brings every possible question to the bar of public opinion, and makes society boil like a pot!