The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863, page 139 by Various Authors
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in every 131, in the South and Southwest 1 in every 12 of the native white adults. (Comp. p. 153.)
These official statistics enable me, then, again to say that slavery is hostile to the progress of wealth and education, to science and literature, 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 condition, classifying them by law as chattels, darkening the immortal soul, and making it a crime to teach millions of human beings to read or write. Surely such a system is hostile to civilization, which consists in the education of the masses of the people of a country, and not of the few only. A State, one third of whose population are slaves, classified by law as chattels, and forbidden all instruction, and nearly one fifth of whose adult whites cannot read or write, is semi-civilized, however enlightened may be the ruling classes. If a highly educated chief or parliament governed China or Dahomey, they would still be semi-civilized or barbarous countries, however enlightened their rulers might be. The real discord between the North and the South, is not only the difference between freedom and slavery, but between civilization and barbarism caused by slavery. When we speak of a civilized nation, we mean the masses of the people, and not the government or rulers only. The enlightenment of the people is the true criterion of civilization, and any community that falls below this standard, is barbarous or semi-civilized. In countries where kings or oligarchies rule, the government may be maintained, (however unjustly,) without educating the masses; but, in a republic, or popular government, this is impossible; and the deluded masses of the South never could have been driven into this rebel