Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/45

Rh effacing the image of the Creator from several millions of human beings, and this not without religious pretences, not without prayer. Almost as degrading to the poor whites as to the negro—morally, perhaps, even more degrading—it immolated the whole community to the vicious ends of a few wealthy men. Against the distinct command of Christianity, it branded labour with dishonour; and within its pale the meanest white preferred a life of penury, wandering, sponging on the great planters, to honest industry—the lot and badge of the negro slave. Instinctively hating the light which Christianity loves, as well as dreading the growth of intelligence in the slave or in the dependent white, it excluded popular education and every source of popular enlightenment; and when Secession had fairly let loose its tongue, it spoke of them openly with devilish hatred. By brutalising labour, it often blasted the fertility of the very soil which it occupied, and the forest is seen growing in Virginia over the traces of ancient cultivation. Pretending to set intellect free from manual toil and to dedicate it to higher ends, it produced no intellectual fruits whatever, except a statecraft, the sole object of which was to maintain and propagate Slavery. It could not produce intellectual fruit, because the noble aspirations which lead to the discovery of truth, the tenderness which creates intellectual beauty, could not dwell with brutality and injustice. The traveller in its realms found no books, no musical instruments, no means of culture. It generated a barbarism, the deeper because it was not original but relapsed, which met the civilisation of the Free States on the boundary line between them, like a dark element meeting a brighter, and was plainly depicted on the very faces of the Southern