In the South, there are many roads leading from the top of society to the bottom, but not one, not ONE from the bottom to the top.
Henry Ward Beecher
The Public Record
Henry Ward Beecher was an American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God's love, and his 1875 adultery trial. His rhetorical focus on the love of Christ has influenced mainstream Christianity through the 21st century.
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In the North, if the citizen chooses to walk in it, there is a road from every man's door up to the Governor's chair or the Presidential seat!
In the North, first in order of consideration is man, the individual man; next the family, made of those of common blood, and by far the strongest, as it is the most sacred of all institutions.
And in Society, in the North, there are no classes except such as rise out of spontaneous forces.
Wealth, experience, ability set men above their fellows.
But they stand there, not by legal force, nor to exercise any legal power, or to have one single privilege or prerogative, which does not belong just as much to every citizen clear down to the bottom.
All that a class means in the North is, that when men have shown themselves strong and wise men give them honor for it.
There is no division of society into orders, by which some have privilege and some have not, some have opportunity and advantages which others have not.
In the South, society is divided into two great and prominent classes--the ruling and the obeying--the thinking and the working.
All the benefits that have accrued to man from Christianity, are appropriated and monopolized by the white population.
Here is a society organized, not on an idea of equal rights, and of inequalities only as they spring from difference of worth, but on an idea of permanent, political, organized inequality among men.
If he must stand by what he is, how surely must he be given over to weakness, to abuse, to oppressions.