n fetters cannot
do the task-work that one whose limbs are unshackled looks upon as a
pastime. A man urged by the prospect of winning an improved condition
for himself and his children by the skill of his brain and the
industry of his hand must needs achieve results such as no fear of
torture can extort from one denied the holy stimulus of hope. Hence
the difference so often noticed between tracts lying side by side,
separated only by a river or an imaginary line; on one side of which,
thrift and comfort and gathering wealth, growing villages, smiling
farms, convenient habitations, school-houses, and churches make the
landscape beautiful; while on the other, slovenly husbandry,
dilapidated mansions, sordid huts, perilous wastes, horrible roads,
the rare spire, and rarer village school betray all the nakedness of
the land. It is the magic of motive that calls forth all this wealth
and beauty to bless the most sterile soil stirred by willing and
intelligent labor; while the reversing of that spell scatters squalor
and poverty and misery over lands endowed by Nature with the highest
fertility, spreading their leprous infection from the laborer to his
lord. All this is in strict accordance with the laws of God, as
expounded by man in his books on political economy.

Not so, however, with the stranger phenomenon to be discerned
inextricably connected with this anomaly, but not, apparently,
naturally and inevitably flowing from it. That the denial of his
natural and civil rights to the laborer who sows and reaps the
harvests of the Southern country should be avenged upon his enslaver
in the scanty yielding of the earth, and in the unthrift, the vices,
and the wretchedness which are the only crops that spring
spontaneously from soil blasted by slavery, is nothing strange. It is
only the statement of the truism in moral and in political economy,
that true prosperity can never grow up from wrong and wickedness. That
pauperism, and ignorance, and vice, that reckless habits, and debasing
customs, and barbarous manners should come of an organized degradation
of labor, and of cruelty and injustice crystallized into an
institution, is an inevitable necessity, and strictly according to the
nature of things. But that the stronger half of the nation should
suffer the weaker to rule over it in virtue of its weakness, that the
richer region should submit to the political tyranny of its
impoverished moiety because of that very poverty, is