Had God intended that the work of the world should be done by human bones and sinews, he would have given us an arm as solid and strong as the shaft of a steam engine; and enabled us to stand, day and night, and turn the crank of a…

Had God designed the human muscles to do the work of the world, then, instead of the ingredients of gunpowder or gun cotton, and the expansive force of heat, he would have given us hands which could take a granite quarry and break its…

Had he intended us for bearing burdens, he would have given us Atlantean shoulders, by which we could carry the vast freights of rail-car and steamship, as a porter carries his pack.

He would have given us lungs by which we could blow fleets before us, and wings to sweep over ocean wastes.

But, instead of iron arms, and Atlantean shoulders, and the lungs of Boreas, he has given us a mind, a soul, a capacity of acquiring knowledge, and thus of appropriating all these energies of nature to our own use.

Instead of a telescopic and microscopic eye, he has given us power to invent the telescope and the microscope.

Instead of ten thousand fingers, he has given us genius inventive of the power loom and the printing press.

Without a cultivated intellect, man is among the weakest of all the dynamical forces of nature; with a cultivated intellect, he commands them all.

An educated man surpasses the ancient idea of a river god; he stands by the Penobscot, the Kennebec, the Merrimack, or the Connecticut; he commands each of them to do more work than could be performed by a hundred thousand men,--to saw…

Ignorant slaves stand upon a coal mine, and to them it is only a worthless part of the inanimate earth.

An educated man uses the same mine to print a million of books.

The slave worker is forever prying at the short end of Nature’s lever, and using the back instead of the edge of her finest instruments.

The larger capital, in the form of intelligence, yielded the larger interest in the form of wages.

The universal cultivation of the mind and heart is the only true source of opulence;--the cultivation of the mind, by which to lay hold on the treasures of nature; the cultivation of the heart, by which to devote those treasures to…

Where this cultivation exists, no matter how barren the soil or ungenial the clime, there comfort and competence will abound; for it is the intellectual and moral condition of the cultivator that impoverishes the soil or makes it teem with…

But slavery makes the general education of the whites impossible.

You cannot have general education without Common Schools.

Slavery, then, by an inexorable law, denies general education to the whites.

Create a serf caste, and debar them from education, and you necessarily debar a great portion of the privileged class from education also.

It is impossible, in the present state of things, or in any state of things which can be foreseen, to have free and universal education in a slave state.

Now, this can never be done in an agricultural community where there are two classes of men--one to do all the work, and the other to seize all the profits.

With New England habits of industry, and with that diversified labor which would be sure to spring from intelligence, the State of Virginia, which skirts us here on the south, would support all the population of the New England states, and…

I say, sir, the single State of Virginia could support in abundance the whole population of New England.

With such a free population, the school children would be so numerous that public schools might be opened within three or four miles of each other all over its territory,--the light of each of which, blending with its neighboring lights…

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