Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/268

Rh made subordinate to the owners' lash. While the North, from 1620 to 1856, has aimed to spread education over all the land, and facilitate the acquisition of property by the individual, and prevent its entailment in families, or its excessive accumulation by transient corporations, the South has always endeavoured to limit education, making it the exclusive monopoly of the few—who yet learned not much—and now makes it a State prison offence to teach the labouring class to read and write: it aims to condense money into large sums, permanently held, if not in families, at least in a class.

Thus, at one extreme, the South had formed a permanently idle and lordly class, who shun labour and monopolize government.

The South culminates in Virginia and South Carolina, which bear the same relation to the slave States that New England does to the free States ; that is, they are the mother-city of population, ideas, institutions, and character. As I just said, Christendom cannot boast a population in any other country where there are fifteen millions of men so nobly developed as the fifteen millions of the North; so far advanced in Christianity and democracy; with so much material comfort, enjoyment of natural rights, and development of natural powers. Compare New England with Old England, Scotland, France, Saxony, Belgium, Prussia, any of the foremost nations of Europe, and you see that it is so. But take the ten millions of the South, and see what they are: nowhere in Europe, north of Turkey and west of Russia, can you find ten millions of contiguous men who have so low a development, intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious, as the ten millions of the slave States; nowhere can you find Caucasians or any other people in Western Europe so slightly advanced above the savage. Three and a quarter millions are actual slaves. Take the States of Virginia and South Carolina, in which the South comes to its flower: there are one million one hundred and seventy thousand whites, nine hundred and twenty thousand coloured, whereof eight hundred and sixty thousand are slaves; that is to say, out of two millions, more than one-third are only human property, not counted as human persons. In South Carolina, out of a hundred native whites over twenty years of age, there are seven who cannot read