Horace Mann: “Yet by what safeguards of constitution, of law, and of forms of practice, is life protected amongst us?”

A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.

I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.

The man of independent circumstances has this liberty; and no man’s circumstances, not even the poorest and the humblest, should be so dependent as to take it away.

Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.