When has Virginia, in any state or national election, given a majority equal to the number of its voters unable to read or write?

A republican government supported by the two pillars of Slavery and Ignorance!

Yet in many of the slave states there are beautiful paper systems of Common Schools,--dead laws in the statute books,--and the census tells us how profitless they have been.

The scholars in the primary schools of Ohio alone, outnumbered all those in the fifteen slave states and territories by more than 17,000.

Surely it would take more than five of these to make three freemen; for the more a state has of them, the less of intelligent freedom will there be in it.

And if the schools in the slave states are compared with the schools in the free states, the deficiency in quality will be found as great as the deficiency in number.

They set forth the benefits and the blessings of education; but they speak in a vacuum, and no one hears the appeal.

If a parent wishes to educate his children, he must send them from home, and thus suffer a sort of bereavement, even while they live; or he must employ a tutor or governess in his family, which few are able to do.

The rich may do it, but what becomes of the children of the poor?

All this is the inevitable consequence of slavery; and it is as impossible for free, thorough, universal education to coëxist with slavery as for two bodies to occupy the same space at the same time.

Slavery would abolish education, if it should invade a free state; education would abolish slavery, if it could invade a slave state.

Destroying common education, slavery destroys the fruits of common education,--the inventive mind, practical talent, the power of adapting means to ends in the business of life.

All history and experience affirm that they have come, and must come, from people among whom education is most generous and unconfined.

Increase the constituency, if I may so speak, of developed intellect, and you increase in an equal ratio the chances of inventive, creative genius.

Out of five hundred and seventy-two patents issued in 1847, only sixty-six went to the slave states.

This question, when put in reference to slaves, appears ridiculous; and yet it is no more absurd, when asked in reference to an ignorant slave, than when asked in reference to an uneducated white man.

All such improvements come from minds which have had an early awakening, and been put on scientific trains of thought in their childhood and youth,--a thing utterly impossible for the people at large, without Common Schools.

In the New England states, the iron manufacture is twenty times as much, according to the population, as it is in Virginia; and yet Virginia has far more of the ore than they.

Diligence earns much, but the absence of the vices of indolence saves more.

Societies for preventing crime; for saving from pauperism; for the reform of prisons and the reformation of prisoners; for peace; for sending missionaries to the heathen; for diffusing the gospel,--all these, where a sound education is…

Slavery, it is not to be denied, is an essentially barbarous institution.

It gives us, too, that sign which is the perpetual distinction of barbarism, that it has no law of progress.

A class of statesmen were thus raised up, who were prepared to figure as leaders in scenes of public life, where so much depends on manners and social address.

Free labor is rising, at length, into a state of wealth and comfort, to take the lead of American society.

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