Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/184

150 State; but do you not see that in the same measure as they rise, the ascendency of the slave-power disappears? Thus this has become a free city on slave soil.

But this is not all. Not only are the slaveholders, as a class, unfit to direct the commercial and industrial movement, but their system of labor is unfit to carry it out. Commerce and industry, in order to become independent, need intelligent labor. In the North, every laborer thinks, and is required to think. In the South the laborer is forbidden to think, lest he think too much, for thought engenders aspirations. With us, progress and enterprise derive their main support, their strongest impulses, from the intellectual development of the laboring classes. We do not dread the aspirations arising from it; it is the source of our prosperity, and, at the same time, of our safety. Our laboring man must be a freeman, in order to be what he ought to be—an intelligent laborer. Therefore, we educate him for liberty by our system of public instruction. In the South, the intellectual development of the laboring classes necessary for intelligent labor would create aspirations dangerous to your domestic institutions. Your laboring man must be a brute in order to remain what you want him to be—a slave. Therefore, you withhold from him all means of intellectual development. Among our farms and workshops there stands an institution from which our system of labor derives its inspirations—that is, our schoolhouse, where our free laborers are educated. On your plantation-fields there stands another institution, from which your system of labor derives its inspirations; and that is your schoolhouse, where your slaves are flogged. And you speak of establishing the commercial and industrial independence of the slaveholding States! Do you not see that, in order to do this, you must adapt your system of labor to that purpose by making the laborer intelligent,