Wherein consists the advantage of a republican government over a despotism, if the freedom of speech and of the press, which can be strangled in the one by arbitrary command, can be stifled in the other by obloquy and denunciation?
He questions the value of free speech in a government that allows suppression through public opinion.
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Even cold, barren New England, though more than twice as thickly peopled, grew in population at a faster rate than these old slave states.
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.
But the impious hand of man divorces these twin capacities, wherever it denies knowledge.
Packed and stowed like merchandise between unventilated decks, so close that the tempest without could not ruffle the pestilential air within, the voyage was begun.
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