On the record
What I have said, I have said as to a brother sleeping on the brink of a precipice, where one motion of his troubled sleeping, or of his bewildered awaking, might plunge him into remediless ruin.
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gutenberg.orgEditor's note · Context
Mann uses a metaphor to illustrate the precarious situation of those he addresses, likening them to a brother on the edge of danger.
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The north comes to the south, cuts their timber, carries it home, manufactures it, and then brings it back, wrought into a hundred different forms, to be sold to those who would see it rot before their eyes.
No man of common sense, who has observed this result, can doubt for a moment that the system of free labor promotes the growth and prosperity of states in a much higher degree than the system of slave labor.
They cannot do otherwise with laborers who work by compulsion, for the benefit only of their masters, and whose sole interest in the matter is to do as little and to consume as much as possible.
This ruinous system of large farms cultivated by slaves showed its effects in Italy, eighteen hundred years ago, when the Roman empire was at the height of its grandeur.
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