Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/52

40 sixty-two; and New York, with a population of only 2,428,921, had received two hundred and forty-seven patent-rights—more than three times as many as the whole South. Works which require intelligence and skill require also the hand of the freeman. The South can grow timber, it is the North which builds the ships. The South can rear cotton, the free intelligence of the North must weave it into cloth.

In the North the freeman acts directly upon things by his own will; in the South, only through the medium of men reduced to the rank of things, and they act on material objects against their will. Half the moral and intellectual effect of labour is thereby lost; half the productive power of the labour itself. All the great movements of industry decline where the aristocracy own the bodies of the labouring class. No fertility of soil or loveliness of climate can ever make up for the want of industry, invention, and thrift in the labouring population itself. Agriculture will not thrive as under the freeman’s hand. Slave labour can only be profitably employed in the coarse operations of field-work. It was so in Italy 2000 years ago; the rich gardens of Latium, Alba, Tuscany, were the work of freemen. When their owners were reduced to slavery by the Roman conqueror, those gardens became only pastures for buffalos and swine. Only coarse staples, sugar, cotton, rice, corn, tobacco, can be successfully raised by the slave of America. His rude tillage impoverishes the soil; the process of tilth "consists in killing the land." They who will keep slavery as a "patriarchal institution," must adopt the barbarism of the patriarchs, become nomadic, and wander from the land they have exhausted to some virgin soil. The freeman^s fertilizing hand enriches the land the longer he labours.

In Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the soil is getting exhausted; the old land less valuable than the new. In 1787, said Gouverneur Morris, in the national Convention, "Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people, with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other States having slaves. Travel