Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/72

60 $71,225,127, those of New York at $100,380,707; in 1839 the real estate in Virginia was worth but $211,930,538, while that of New York had increased to $430,751,273. In 1840 the annual earnings of Virginia were $76,769,032; of New York $ 193,806,433. The population of New York is not quite double that of Virginia, but her annual earnings nearly three times as great. In 1840, at her various colleges and schools, Virginia had 57,302 scholars, and also 58,787 adult free whites unable to read and write—1484 more than the entire number of her children at school or college. New York had 44,452 illiterate adults, and 565,442 children at school or college. Besides that, in Virginia there were 448,987 slaves, with no literary culture at all, shut out from communication with the intelligence of the age. In 1844, in New York, 709,156 children, between four and sixteen, attended the common public schools of the State, and the common school libraries contained over a million of volumes; while in Virginia there were over 100,000 free white children between four and sixteen, who attended no school at all, perpetual vagrants from learning, year out and year in. Shall it always be so? The effect follows the cause. A man loses half his manhood by slavery, said Homer, and it is as true of a State as a man.

call your attention to the influence of slavery on law and politics, its local effect on the slave States in special, its general effect on the politics of the Union.

In the settlement of America only the people came over. Nobility and royalty did not migrate. The people, the third estate, of course brought the institutions and laws of their native land—these are the national habits, so to say. But they brought also political sentiments and ideas not represented by the institutions or laws; sentiments and