The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict by Newell Dwight Hillis
page 26 of 228 (11%)
page 26 of 228 (11%)
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America must be educated and free, if they were to compete with the free
working people of Great Britain and Europe. Contrariwise, the South believed that manual labour was a task for slaves, that cotton, rice and sugar were produced more rapidly by slave labour than by free labour. The Southern civilization was built on the plan of producing raw cotton, and exchanging it for manufactured goods. It did not escape the notice of Southern leaders, however, that under free labour the North had nearly double the population and wealth of the South. But Senator Hayne explained this by saying that the biggest nations had never been the greatest, and that the renowned peoples had been like Athens,--small states, elect and patrician. But darkness and light, summer and winter, liberty and slavery cannot exist side by side, in peace and tranquility. Unite hydrogen and chlorine, and the chemist has an explosion that takes off the roof of the house. And because liberty and slavery were antagonistic, and mutually destructive, whenever the representatives of both came together there was inevitably an explosion either on the platform or through the press. It could not have been otherwise. In Palestine two opposing civilizations came into collision,--one the Hebrew and the other the Philistine,--and the Philistine went down. In Holland the Dutchmen, working towards democracy, collided with the Spaniards, working towards autocracy, and the Spaniard went down. In England, Hampden and Pym came into collision with Charles the First and Archbishop Laud. The two leaders of democracy wished to increase the privileges of the common people by diffusing property, liberty, office and honours, while Charles the First and Laud wished to lessen the powers of the people, and to increase the privileges of the throne; democracy won, and autocracy lost. And now in this republic, a civilization based upon the freedom and education of the working classes came into collision with the |
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