The slave states gain millions of dollars every year from the privations, the mean food, clothing, and shelter to which the slaves are subjected; and yet they grow rich less rapidly than states where millions of dollars are annually…

More is lost in production than is gained by privation.

A universal concomitant of slavery is, that it makes white labor disreputable.

Abolish those sources of wealth, which consist in the personal industry of every man, and of each member of every man’s family, and that wide-spread thrift, and competence, and elegance, which are both the reward and the stimulus of labor…

Nothing but the feeling of independence, the conscious security of working for one’s self and one’s family, will, in the present state of the world, make labor profitable.

Another answer to the above assertion is, that if white labor were reputable at the south, and white men were industrious, the whole country would be a garden,--a terrestrial paradise,--so far as neatness, abundance, and beauty are…

My recent visit to the northern states has fully satisfied me that the true secret of our difficulties lies in the want of energy on the part of our capitalists, and ignorance and laziness on the part of those who ought to labor.

We need never look for thrift while we permit our immense timber forests, granite quarries, and mines to lie idle, and supply ourselves with hewn granite, pine boards, laths, shingles, &c., furnished by the lazy dogs of the north.

It is only necessary to travel over the sterile mountains of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, to learn the true secret of our difficulties,”--“to learn the difference between indolence and industry, extravagance and…

Shall we pass unnoticed the thousands of poor, ignorant, degraded white people among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in comparative nakedness and starvation?

Many a one is reared in proud South Carolina, from birth to manhood, who has never passed a month in which he has not, some part of the time, been stinted for meat.

Many a mother is there who will tell you that her children are but scantily supplied with bread, and much more scantily with meat, and if they be clad with comfortable raiment, it is at the expense of these scanty allowances of food.

But slavery is hostile to the pecuniary advancement of the community in another way.

He must not be educated, lest with education should come a knowledge of his natural rights, and the means of escape or the power of vengeance.

To secure the abolition of his freedom, the growth of his mind must be abolished.

Now, a man is weak in his muscles; he is strong only in his faculties.

It is through mental strength only that man becomes the superior and governor of all animals.

It was not the design of Providence that the work of the world should be performed by muscular strength.

God has filled the earth and imbued the elements with energies of greater power than that of all the inhabitants of a thousand planets like ours.

Whence come our necessaries and our luxuries?--those comforts and appliances that make the difference between a houseless, wandering tribe of Indians in the far west, and a New England village.

They do not come wholly or principally from the original, unassisted strength of the human arm, but from the employment, through intelligence and skill, of those great natural forces with which the bountiful Creator has filled every part…

Caloric, gravitation, expansibility, compressibility, electricity, chemical affinities and repulsions, spontaneous velocities,--these are the mighty agents which the intellect of man harnesses to the car of improvement.

The application of water, and wind, and steam, to the propulsion of machinery, and to the transportation of men and merchandise from place to place, has added ten thousand fold to the actual products of human industry.

The velocity of winds, the weight of waters, and the rage of steam, are powers, each one of which is infinitely stronger than all the strength of all the nations and races of mankind, were it all gathered into a single arm.

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.