r
directed. Massachusetts has achieved much in this respect; but when she
shall have made high schools as free and universal as common schools,
and the attendance on both compulsory, so as to qualify every voter for
governing a State or nation, she will have made a still grander step in
material and intellectual progress, and the results would be still more
astounding. She can thus still more clearly prove the fact, establish
the law, and give us the formula demonstrating that taxes for the
increase and diffusion of knowledge are the best investment for the
increase of national, state, and individual wealth. Then all would
acknowledge the harmony of labor and capital, their ultimate association
in profits for mutual benefit. This social as well as political union,
together with the specializing and differentiation of pursuits, and
observing duties as rights, would falsify the gloomy dogma of Malthus,
founded on the doctrine of the eternal and ever-augmenting antagonism of
wages and money, and solve, in favor of humanity, the great problem of
the grand and glorious destiny of the masses of mankind. The law of
humanity is progress, onward and upward, and will, in time, crush all
opposing obstacles. If all--_all_ were fully educated, what miracles
would be accomplished, how great the increase of important inventions
and discoveries, and how many new and sublime truths in science,
sociology, and government would be developed! Would not the progress of
the State or nation approximate, then, a ratio depending on its numbers?
If all the States had contributed as much as Massachusetts to the
treasury and diffusion of knowledge, our whole country, North and South,
would have been advanced a century, and this rebellion, based upon the
ignorance, imperfect civilization, and semibarbarism produced by
slavery, could never have occurred.

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