Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/189

 SEWARD America, Central America, Louisiana, and Mex- ico. Its legitimate fruits are seen in the poverty, imbecility, and anarchy which now pervade all Portuguese and Spanish America. The free-labor system is of German extraction, and it was established in our country by emi- grants from Sweden, Holland, Germany, Great Britain, and Ireland. We justly ascribe to its influences the strength, wealth, greatness, in- telligence, and freedom which the whole Ameri- can people now enjoy. One of the chief elements of the value of human life is freedom in the pur- suit of happiness. The slave system is not only intolerable, unjust, and inhuman toward the laborer, whom, only because he is a laborer, it loads down with chains and converts into mer- chandise; but is scarcely less severe upon the freeman, to whom, only because he is a laborer from necessity, it denies facilities for employ- ment and whom it expels from the community because it can not enslave and convert him into merchandise also. It is necessarily improvident and ruinous because, as a general truth, com- munities prosper and flourish, or droop and decline in just the degree that they practise or neglect to practise the primary duties of justice and humanity. The free-labor system conforms to the divine law of equality which is written in the hearts and consciences of men, and there- fore is always and everywhere beneficent. The slave system is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion and watchfulness. It de- 179