orm of thought or
any institution tending to suppress education or destroy intelligence
strikes at the very essence of the government, and constitutes a treason
which no law can meet, and for which no punishment is adequate.

Education, then, as universally diffused as the elements of God, is the
life-blood of our body politic. The intelligence of the people is the
one great fact of our civilization and our prosperity,--it is the
beating heart of our age and of our land. It is education alone which
makes equality possible without anarchy, and liberty without license. It
is this--which makes the fundamental principles of our Declaration of
Independence living realities in New England, while in France they still
remain the rhetorical statement of glittering generalities. From this
source flow all our possibilities. Without it, the equality of man is a
pretty figure of speech; with it, democracy is possible. This is a path
beaten by two hundred years of footprints, and while we walk it we are
safe and need fear no evil; but if we diverge from it, be it for never
so little, we stumble, and, unless we quickly retrace our steps, we fall
and are lost. The tutelary goddess of American liberty should be the
pure marble image of the Professor's Yankee school-mistress. Education
is the fundamental support of our system. It was education which made us
free, progressive, and conservative; and it is education alone which can
keep us so.

With this fact clearly established, the next inquiry should be as to
the bearing and policy of the Cotton dynasty as touching this
question of general intelligence. It is a mere truism to say that the
cotton-culture is the cause of the present philosophical and economical
phase of the African question. Throughout the South, whether justly or
not, it is considered as well settled that cotton can be profitably
raised only by a forced system of labor. This theory has been denied by
some writers, and, in experience, is certainly subject to some marked
exceptions; but undoubtedly it is the creed of the Cotton dynasty,
and must here, therefore, be taken for true.[A] With this theory, the
Southern States are under a direct inducement, in the nature of a bribe,
to the amount of the annual profit on their cotton-crop, to see as
many perfections and as few imperfections as possible in the system of
African slavery, and to follow it out unflinchingly into all its logical
necessities. Thus, under the direct inf