Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/51

Rh menial and degrading; it is the business of slaves. In the free States the majority work with their hands, counting it the natural business of a man, not a reproach, but a duty and a dignity. | Thus in Boston—the richest city of its population in America, and perhaps in the world — out of 19,037 private families in 1845, there were 15,744 who kept no servant, and only 1069 who had more than one assistant to perform their household labour. In the South the freeman shuns labour; "in a slave country every freeman is an aristocrat," and of course labour is avoided by such. Where work is disgraceful, men of spirit will not submit to it. So the high-minded but independent freemen are continually getting worse off, or else emigrating out of the slave States into the new free States,—not as the enterprising adventurer goes from New England, because he wants more room, but because his condition is a reproach.

Most of the productive work of the South is done by slaves. But the slave has no stimulus; the natural instinct of production is materially checked. The master has the mouth which consumes, the slave only the hand which earns. He labours not for himself, but for another; for another who continually wrongs him. His aim, therefore, is to do the least he can get along with. He will practise no economy; no thrift; he breaks his tools. He will not think for his master; it is all hand-work, for he only gives what the master can force from him, and he cannot conceal; there is no head-work. There is no invention in the slave; little among the masters, for their business is to act on men, not directly on things. This circumstance may fit the slave-holder for politics — of a certain character; it unfits him for the great operations of productive industry. They and all labour-saving contrivances come from the North. In 1846 there were seventy-six patents granted by the national office for inventions made in fourteen slave States, with a population of 7,334,431, or one for each 96,505 persons; at the same time there were 564 granted to the free States with a population of 9,728,922, or one for each 17,249 persons. Maryland, by her position, partakes more of the character of the free States than most of her sisters, and accordingly made twenty-one inventions—more than a fourth part of all made in the South. But Massachusetts had made