Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/251

Rh the school-house, the meeting-house, the court-house, the town-house. There will be the same industry, thrift, intelligence, morality, and religion, and the idle ground that has hitherto borne nothing but gold, will bear upon its breast a republic of men more precious than the gold of Ophir, or the rubies of the East.

Here I wish I could stop. But this is not all. The North is not the whole nation; New England is not the only type of the people. There are other States differing widely from this. In the southern States you find a soil more fertile under skies more genial. Through what beautiful rivers the Alleghanies pour their tribute to the sea! What streams beautify the land in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi! There genial skies rain beauty on the soil. Nature is wanton of her gifts. There rice, cotton, and sugar grow; there the olive, the orange, the fig, all find a home. The soil teems with luxuriance. But there is not the same wealth, nor the same comfort. Only the ground is rich. You witness not a similar thrift. Strange is it, but in 1840 the single State of New York alone earned over four million dollars more than the six States of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi! The annual earnings of little Massachusetts, with her seven thousand and five hundred square miles, are nine million dollars more than the earnings of all Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina ! The little county of Essex, with ninety-five thousand souls in 1840, earned more than the large State of South Carolina, with five hundred and ninety-five thousand.

In those States we miss the activity, intelligence, and enterprise of the North. You do not find the little humble school-house at every corner; the frequent meeting-house does not point its taper finger to the sky. Villages do not adorn the margin of the mountain, stream, and sea; shops do not ring with industry; roads of earth and iron are poorer and less common. Temperance, morality, comfort are not there as here. In the slave States, in 1840, there were not quite three hundred and two thousand youths and maidens in all the schools, academies, and colleges of the South; but in 1840, in the free States of the North there were more than two million two hundred and twelve thousand in such institutions! Little Rhode Island has