By table 35 of the census, p. 195, the whole value of all the property, real and personal, of Massachusetts, in 1860, was $815,237,433, and of Maryland, $376,919,944. We have seen that the value of the products that year in Massachusetts was $283,000,000 (exclusive of commerce), and of Maryland, $65,583,000. As a question, then, of profit on capital, that of Massachusetts was 34 per cent., and of Maryland 17 per cent. Such is the progressive advance (two to one) of free as compared with slave labor. The same law obtains in comparing all the free with all the slave States. But the proof is still more complete. Thus, Delaware and Missouri (alone of all the slave States) were ahead of Maryland in this rate of profit, because both had comparatively fewer slaves; and all the other slave States, whose servile population was relatively larger than that of Maryland, were below her in the rate of profit. The law extends to counties, those having comparatively fewest slaves increasing far more rapidly in wealth and population. This, then, is the formula as to the rate of profit on capital. First, the free States; next the States and counties of the same State having the fewest relative number of slaves. The census, then, is an evangel against slavery, and its tables are revelations proclaiming laws as divine as those written by the finger of God at Mount Sinai on the tables of stone.
For seventy years we have had these census tables, announcing these great truths more and more clearly at each decade. They are the records of the nation's movement and condition, the decennial monuments marking her steps in the path of empire, the oracles of her destiny. They are prophecies, for each decade fulfils the predictions of its predecessor. They announce laws, not made by man, but the irrevocable ordinances of the Almighty. We cannot, with impunity, refuse to obey these laws. For every violation, they enforce their own penalties. From these there is no escape in the present or the past, nor for the future, except in conformity to their demands. These laws condemn slavery; and the punishment for disobedience is recorded in the result of every census, and finally culminated in the rebellion. Slavery and freedom are antagonistic and discordant elements: the conflict between them is upon us; it admits of no neutrality or compromise, and one or the other system must perish.
We have seen that slavery is hostile to the progress of wealth and population: let us now ascertain its influence on moral and intellectual development.
By table 15 of the census of 1860, the result for that year was as follows: In Massachusetts, value of books printed, $397,500; jobs, 529,347; newspapers, $1,979,069; total, $2,905,916. Same year in Maryland, books printed, $58,000; jobs, $122,000; newspapers, $169,000; total, $350,155. By table 37, census of 1860, Massachusetts had 222 newspapers and periodicals, of which 112 were political, 31 religious, 51 literary, miscellaneous, 28. Maryland had only 57, all political. The whole number of copies issued in Massachusetts in 1860 was 102,000,760, and in Maryland, 20,721,472. Of periodicals, Massachusetts has monthly, 1 political, 10 religious, 18 literary, 7 miscellaneous; quarterly, religious 3, literary 2, miscellaneous 1, and 1 annual. Maryland had none. Not a religious, literary, scientific, or miscellaneous periodical or journal in the State! What terrible truths are unfolded in these statistics! None but a political party press in Maryland, all devoted, in 1860, to the maintenance, extension, and perpetuity of slavery, which had 57 advocates, and not one for science, religion, or literature.
We have seen that the circulation in 1860 of the press in Massachusetts exceeded that of Maryland by more than eighty-one millions of copies. These facts all prove that slavery is hostile to knowledge and its diffusion, to science, literature, and religion, to the press, and to free government.
For schools, colleges, libraries, and churches, I must take the tables of the census of 1850, those of 1860 not being yet published. There were in 1850, in Massachusetts, 3,679 public schools, 4,443 teachers, 176,475 pupils; native adults who cannot read or write, 1,861. In Maryland, 907 public schools, 1,005 teachers, 33,254 pupils; native adults who cannot read or write, 38,426, excluding slaves, to teach whom is criminal.
Thus, then, slavery is hostile to schools, withholding instruction from the children of the poor.
The number of public libraries in Massachusetts was 1,462, volumes 684,015. In Maryland, 124, and 125,042 volumes. Value of churches in Massachusetts, $10,206,000. In Maryland, $3,947,884, of which $2,541,240 is in Baltimore (which has very few slaves), and the remainder is mainly in the seven counties (from which slavery has nearly disappeared) adjoining Pennsylvania.
As to schools, colleges, books, libraries, churches, newspapers, and periodicals, it thus appears that Massachusetts is greatly in advance of Maryland.
Now then, let us contrast loyal Maryland with rebel South Carolina, the author of secession, and assuming for many years to instruct the nation. By the census of 1860, she had a population of 703,708, of whom 402,406 were slaves; and Maryland, numbering 687,049, had 87,189 slaves. Now, by the census of 1860, South Carolina had 45 journals and periodicals, and her annual circulation was 3,654,840 copies. The circulation therefore of Massachusetts exceeded that of South Carolina more than ninety-eight millions of copies, while Maryland exceeded South Carolina more than seventeen millions of copies. So much for South Carolina as a great political teacher. As to schools in 1850: South Carolina had 724 public schools, 739 teachers, 17,838 pupils. Massachusetts, then, had 158,637 more pupils at public schools than South Carolina, and Maryland 15,416 more pupils at public schools than South Carolina.
The press of Massachusetts, we have seen, circulated in 1860 upward of one hundred and two millions of copies, equal to 279,454 per day, including journals and periodicals, each read, on an average, by at least two persons. This is independent of books and pamphlets, and of the very large circulation of papers from other States and from Europe. What a flood of light is thus shed daily and hourly upon the people of Massachusetts! This intellectual effulgence radiates by day and night. It is the sun in its meridian splendor, and the stars in an ever unclouded firmament. It has a centre and a circumference, but knows no darkness. Ignorance vanishes before it; wealth follows in its train; labor rejoices in its association, and finds its products more than doubled; freedom hails its presence, and religion gives it a cordial welcome; churches, schools, academies, colleges, and universities acknowledge its mighty influence. Science penetrates the secrets of nature, and unfolds each new discovery for the benefit of man. Coal, the offspring of the sun, develops its latent energy, and water contributes its untiring hydraulic power. Machinery takes more and more the place of nerves and muscles, cheapens clothing and subsistence and all the necessaries of life, and opens new fields of industry, and more profitable employment for labor. Steam and lightning become the slave of man. He performs the journey of a day in an hour, and converses in minutes around the globe. The strength of man may not have been much increased, but his power is augmented a thousand-fold. His life may not have been materially lengthened, but, in the march of knowledge, a year now is as a century, compared with man's progress in the darkness of the middle ages. The eternal advance toward omniscience goes on, but is like that of the infinite approach of the asymptote, which never reaches the hyperbolic curve. The onward march of science is in a geometrical ratio, so that in time, the intellectual progress of a day in the future, must exceed that of a century in the past. Knowledge is enthroned as a king, and grand truths and new ideas are his ministers. Science takes the diameter of the earth's orbit as a base line and unit of measurement, and with it spans infinity, and triangulates the nebulous systems amid the shadowy verges of receding space. Its researches are cosmical upon the earth and the heavens, and all the elements minister to its progress. Sink to the lowest mine, or fathom the ocean's depth, or climb the loftiest mountains, or career through the heavens on silken wings, and it is there also. Ononon; nearernearerstill nearer it moves forever and forever, with accelerated speed, toward the infinite eternal. Such are the triumphs of knowledge; and he who diffuses it among our race, or discovers and disseminates new truths, advances man nearer to his Creator. He exalts the whole race; he elevates it in the scale of being, and raises it into higher and still higher spheres.
It is science that marks the speed of sound and light and lightning, calculates the eclipses, catalogues the stars, maps the heavens, and follows, for centuries of the past and the future, the comet's course. It explores the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. With geology, it notes the earthquake, upheaval of mountains, and, with mineralogy, the laws of crystallization. With chemistry, it analyzes, decomposes, and compounds the elements. If, like Canute, it cannot arrest the tidal wave, it is subjecting it to laws and formulas. Taking the sunbeam for its pencil, it pictures man's own image, and the scenery of the earth and the heavens. Has science any limits or horizon? Can it ever penetrate the soul of man, and reveal the mystery of his existence and destiny? It is certainly exploring the facts of sociology, arranging and generalizing them, and deducing laws. It regards man in his social relations, in families, tribes, and governments, savage, semi-barbarous, and civilized; beginning with the most simple, advancing to the chief, the patriarch, the king, the feudal military, the regal aristocratic, the pure democracy by popular assemblages, as in Athens and the school towns of Massachusetts, rising higher to the central representative, and to the highest, although necessarily more complex, the federal constitutional representative, carrying out the organic division, and the subdivision of legislative and administrative actionregarding the state, the national, and international policy, and, in the lapse of centuries, the confederacy, fusion, and unification of nations. The constitution of empires, with the legislative, judicial, and executive functions, furnish some of the elements of sociology. But we must take the history of man, past, present, and future, note and arrange and generalize the facts, and thence deduce laws and formulas. Sociology is not a mere accidental and disconnected series of facts, but it has laws, although far less known than those appertaining to the physical sciences. The work is commenced, and progresses here and in Europe. But, at this moment, at least in administrative action, Massachusetts is ahead of all the world in the science of sociology.
Man, elevated by knowledge in the scale of being, controls the forces of nature with greater power and grander results, and accumulates wealth more rapidly. The educated free labor of Massachusetts, we have seen, triples the products of toil, per capita, as compared with Maryland, and quintuples them (as the census shows) compared with South Carolina. One day's labor of a man in Massachusetts is equal to three in Maryland, and five in South Carolina. So, if we take our savage tribes, with their huts and tents, their rude agriculture, their furs, their few and simple household manufactures, their hunting and fishing, the average product of their annual labor, at four cents a day each, would be $14.60 a year, or more than a fourth of that of South Carolina (56.91). So that Massachusetts, in material progress, is farther in advance of South Carolina than that State is of the savage Indians. Thus, we have the successive steps and gradations of man: Massachusetts, with free labor and free schools, having reached the highest point of civilization; South Carolina, with slavery and ignorance (except the few), in a semi-barbarous stage; and the lowest savage condition, called barbarous, but nearer to South Carolina than that State to Massachusetts.
Slavery, then, the census proves, is hostile to the progress of wealth and population, to science, literature, and education, to schools, colleges, and universities, to books and libraries, to churches and religion, to the press, and therefore to free government; hostile to the poor, keeping them in want and ignorance; hostile to labor, reducing it to servitude, and decreasing two thirds the value of its products; hostile to morals, repudiating among slaves the marital and parental condition, classifying them by law as chattels, darkening the immortal soul, and making it a crime to teach millions of human beings to read or write. And shall labor and education, literature and science, religion and the press, sustain an institution which is their deadly foe?
But slavery is the enemy of free government. It has commenced and now wages an unholy war against this Union, and thus assails the liberty of our country and of mankind. It has framed a government based on the eternity of chattel slavery, and demands in its name to rule the larger portion of the Union. It seeks to sever the lakes from the gulf, and the mighty Mississippi and its vast arterial tributary system. It asks to be let alone in the commission of all these heaven-daring crimes. In the name of my bleeding country, of the millions whom it has doomed to death, or wounds, or chains, or misery; in the name of the widows and orphans it has made, whose bitter tears and agonizing sighs now fill our land with sorrow; in the name of the free and blessed government it seeks to overthrow, and the glorious Union it strives to dissolve; in the name of God and man, of religion and liberty, the world arraigns the criminal at the bar of justice. Now is the day of trial: humanity hopes and fears, mankind await the verdict. It is rendered: Guilty upon every charge of the indictment; and heaven records the righteous sentenceSlavery must die, that the Union and liberty may live forever!
SOMETHING WE HAVE TO THINK OF, AND TO DO
The President's order for a draftaside from its immediate purposehas an important bearing in a more general view on the education of the public mind. It is an impressive enforcement of the great principle that every able-bodied man in the nation owes military service to his country as sacredly as he owes obedience to his God. This is a principle which probably few persons will hesitate to admit when plainly confronted with it. But the conviction of it has slumbered in the mind of the people during the long years of peace we have enjoyed. There has been almost nothing to remind us of it for fifty years past. The draft is an emphatic proclamation of it. It brings it home to the conscience of the nation; and thousands, who might otherwise have scarcely thought of it, will be led to recognize and to feel it.
It is to be hoped that we shall go furtherthat the quickened sense of obligation will make us consider what we must do to make the discharge of it of the greatest service to the nation; that we shall learn the lessons of wisdom which the present struggle enforces on us, and see to it, that in the future, by better military organization and instruction, the able-bodied men of the country are rendered more capable of effective military service at a moment's call.
Oar military system, and the enrolment of the people under it, goes indeed upon this principle of the obligation of military service by every able-bodied citizenand so is a constant testimony to it; but in point of fact it has done comparatively little toward cherishing the military spirit, cultivating the military virtues, and securing an effective military force, ready at any moment for active service in the field. Dreading nothing from foreign nations on this side of the ocean, counting on the obvious policy of the nations of the old world to keep the peace with us, and never dreaming of such a rebellion as has broken out in our midstwe have not only neglected but discountenanced the cultivation of the military spirit. Our men of education and high social position, instead of contributing to make the militia system respectable by the personal performance of military duty, and by using all their influence to give a high tone to the service, have evaded its requirements on themselves, and done all they could to sink it into disregard and contempt: a dereliction of duty as unwise as wrong.