cy, 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
condit