The Battle of Principles | Page 9

that was strong, educated, prosperous, with an army and
navy, had not only the right but the duty of imposing government upon
a colony that was ignorant, poor, and degraded, and that this example
of the nation governing a colony by force of arms proved that the white
man, as master, should impose government from without upon the
slave.
Not until years after the war was over did men fully realize that slavery
was weight and free labour wings to the people. The North believed
that the working man should be free, that he should be educated in the
public schools, and that the only way to increase his wage was to
increase his intelligence. Each new knowledge, therefore, brought a
new economic hunger, and made the free labourer a good buyer in the
market, thus supporting factories and shops. Contrariwise the slave was
a poor buyer. The negro picking cotton out of the pod had few
wants,--one garment about his loins, a pone of corn bread, a husk
mattress,--no more. For that reason the slave starved the factory and
shop. Invention in the South perished. Every attempt to found a factory
was attended with failure. Of necessity, the North grew steadily richer
straight through the war, while the South grew steadily poorer. The war
closed with Northern factories and shops and trade at the high tide of
prosperity. The free working man asked many forms of clothing for the
body, books and magazines for the mind, pictures for the walls,
sewing-machine, the reed organ, every conceivable comfort and
convenience for his family, and these many forms of hunger nourished
invention, made the towns centres of manufacturing life, and built a
rich nation. The Northern working man put his head into his task, the
slave, his heel. When the war was over, the South was like a crushed
egg, impoverished by slavery. The peculiar institution had served well

eight thousand slave planters, each of whom owned more than fifty
slaves. But slavery had starved the remaining millions.
Now that the new era has come, no statesman, no scholar, no editor, has
ever indicted slavery as the costliest possible form of production, with
half the skill, eloquence and conviction of Southern writers. What
Northern men believe, the Southerner knows. Unconsciously the
Southern youth was handicapped in the commercial race. His Northern
brother was an athlete, stripped to the skin, while he dragged a fetter,
invisible. That he should have come so near to winning the race is a
tribute to his courage, endurance, and a mental resource that can never
be praised too highly. If the rest of the world could only fight for good
causes, with half the ability, chivalry and bravery that the South fought
for a bad economic system, the world would soon enter upon the
millennium.

II
WEBSTER AND CALHOUN: THE BATTLE LINE IN ARRAY
The year was 1830; the scene, the Senate Chamber in Washington; the
combatants, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. Two hundred and
ten years had now passed since the ship of liberty had come to New
England, and the ship of slavery had landed in Virginia. These
centuries had given ample time for the development of the real genius
and influence of liberty and free labour in the civilization of the North,
and of slave labour upon the institutions of the South. Little by little the
merchants, manufacturers and professional classes of the North had
come to feel that a free and educated working class produces wealth
more cheaply and rapidly than slave labour, and that the working
people of America must be educated and free, if they were to compete
with the free working people of Great Britain and Europe. Contrariwise,
the South believed that manual labour was a task for slaves, that cotton,
rice and sugar were produced more rapidly by slave labour than by free
labour. The Southern civilization was built on the plan of producing
raw cotton, and exchanging it for manufactured goods. It did not escape

the notice of Southern leaders, however, that under free labour the
North had nearly double the population and wealth of the South. But
Senator Hayne explained this by saying that the biggest nations had
never been the greatest, and that the renowned peoples had been like
Athens,--small states, elect and patrician.
But darkness and light, summer and winter, liberty and slavery cannot
exist side by side, in peace and tranquility. Unite hydrogen and chlorine,
and the chemist has an explosion that takes off the roof of the house.
And because liberty and slavery were antagonistic, and mutually
destructive, whenever the representatives of both came together there
was inevitably an explosion either on the platform or through the press.
It could not have been otherwise. In Palestine two opposing
civilizations came into collision,--one