Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/158

154 mud-sills of society,” “essential slaves,” only not so well paid and cared for as his own! While he was uttering this, the valuation of all the lands and goods in South Carolina was not quite $148,000,000, but the valuation of assessable property in Boston was $258,000,000. The “mud-sills,” the “slaves” of the North, in a single city, had $110,000,000 more of property than the whole great State of South Carolina, and her senator thrown in!

Such are the effects that Slavery has on the industrial, intellectual, religious, and political development of the people. It is a four-fold curse upon the master, not less than upon the slave.

Look at New England! She has 60,000 square miles of land; and what is it? Some of you have tilled it; I also for many a year. The soil is thin and poor, the climate ungenial, the summers short, the winters long and terribly severe. Timber, granite, ice, are our natural staples, wherein yet we have no monopoly. Virginia has 63,000 square miles; she has 3000 more than New England, with an admirable soil, and “the finest climate in the world.” Her surface bears everything, from tropic cotton in the southern valleys to arctic moss on the mountain top. The earth teems with most valuable minerals. Her coast has the best of harbours; her great rivers are a static power for internal navigation, small ones a dynamic force for manufactures. She had been settled twelve years while New England had no man but the red India. Now, New England has 3,000,000 people, all free; Virginia a million and a half, and 500,000 of them are slaves. New England has 3600 miles of railroad, which have cost $120,000,000; Virginia 1200 miles, which have cost $23,000,000. The value of the land in Virginia, in 1850, was $252,000,000; in New England, $690,000,000. The whole property of Virginia, in land and goods, in 1856, was $330,000,000; of New England, $1,220,000,000. In 1858 Boston only lacks $72,000,000 to be worth as much as all the lands and goods of the great State of Virginia, with 1,500,000 people and 63,000 square miles of land. By nature how poor New England; Virginia how rich: by art how poor Virginia; how rich New England! Whence the odds? Here is freedom: every