But in a technical and juridical sense the decision of the commissioner is final; and he might as well doom a man to be hurled from the Tarpeian rock, and say that the act is not final, because he only commits the victim to the laws of gravitation, as he has committed Sims to the laws of Georgia.
Mann uses a metaphor to illustrate the finality of the commissioner's decision regarding Sims' fate.
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Can any man give a reason why Norfolk should not have grown like New York, other than the difference in the institutions of the people?
The general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much land, badly, for present gain,--in short, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
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.
But the impious hand of man divorces these twin capacities, wherever it denies knowledge.
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