All great moral questions, though touching them but lightly at first, will come closer and closer home, as long as they live;--growing into greater importance for their posthumous memory than for their living fame, and affecting the fortunes of their posterity even more than their own.
Mann reflects on how moral questions become increasingly significant over time, impacting future generations more than the current one.
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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.
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.
But such largesses to slavery as kings could not afford to give, and the robbery of an entire race of all its rights,--yes, and with authority, too, to make us help commit the robbery,--these are “factitious and imaginary” causes of…
A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.
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