Political Quotes

Horace Mann: “Has it any barriers to keep the spirit of liberty, which has electrified the Old World, from crossing its own borders…”

On the record
Has it any barriers to keep the spirit of liberty, which has electrified the Old World, from crossing its own borders, and quickening its bondmen into mutinous life?--not all of them, but one in ten thousand, one in a hundred thousand of them.
Said by
Horace Mann
Free Soil · Massachusetts

Editor's note · Context

Mann questions whether any barriers can prevent the spread of the spirit of liberty to enslaved individuals.

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

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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.

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