The country might not have had so gaudy and ostentatious a civilization as at present, but it would have had one infinitely more pure and sound.
Horace Mann: “The country might not have had so gaudy and ostentatious a civilization as at present, but it would have had one…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann concludes that a civilization built on freedom would be more virtuous than one built on slavery.
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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.
The kidnapper, Alberti, now lies in a Pennsylvania prison for carrying away a mother and her child; but the mother and the child are now groaning under the lash of a southern taskmaster.
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.
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…





