Slavery is a condition against nature; the curse of nature, therefore, is on it, and it bows to its doom by a law as irresistible as gravity.

It produces a condition of ease which is not the reward of labor, and a state of degradation which is not the curse of idleness.

Therefore, the ease it enjoys cannot but end in a curse, and the degradation it suffers cannot rise into a blessing.

Education and religion thus displaced, the dinner table only remains, and on this hangs, in great part, the keeping of the social state.

But however highly we may estimate the humanizing power of hospitality, it cannot be regarded as any sufficient spring of character.

And when it comes of self-indulgence, or only seeks relief for the tedium of an idle life, scarcely does it bring with it the blessings of a virtue.

The accomplishments it yields are of a mock quality, rather than of a real, having about the same relation to a substantial and finished culture that honor has to character.

We have come up now to a point where we look for true intellectual refinement, and a ripe state of personal culture.

But how clearly is it seen to be a violation of its own laws, for slavery to produce a genuine scholar, or a man who, in any department of excellence, unless it be in politics, is not a full century behind his time?

And if we ask for what is dearer and better still, for a pure Christian morality, the youth of slavery are trained in no such habits as are most congenial to virtue.

Connected with this moral decay, the resources of nature also are exhausted, and her fertile territories changed to a desert, by the uncreating power of a spendthrift institution.

And then, having made a waste where God had made a garden, slavery gathers up the relics of bankruptcy, and the baser relics still of virtue and all manly enterprise, and goes forth to renew, on a virgin soil, its dismal and forlorn…

The free schools of the north lead to the common diffusion of knowledge, and the equalization of society.

The private schools of the south divide men into patricians and plebeians; so that, in the latter, a nuisance grows out of education itself.

With the exception of New Orleans, (whose free schools were commenced and have been presided over by a Massachusetts man,) and three or four other cities, all the libraries in the public schools of the slave states could be carried in a…

All this proceeds from no superiority of natural endowment on the one side, or inferiority on the other.

But it comes because, in one quarter, the common atmosphere is vivified with knowledge, electric with ideas, while slavery gathers its Bœotian fogs over the other.

What West Point has been to our armies in Mexico, that, and more than that, good schools would be to the intelligence and industrial prosperity of our country.

It has been thought by many educators and metaphysicians, that children learn as much before the age of seven years as ever afterwards.

Who, at the south, administers this early knowledge,--these ideas, these views, that have such sovereign efficacy in the formation of adult character?

Who has the custody of children during this ductile, forming, receptive period of life,--a period when the mind absorbs whatever is brought into contact with it?

Ignorance, superstition, vulgarity, passion, and perhaps impurity, are the breasts at which they nurse.

No man can have any self-respect, who is not solicitous about his posthumous reputation.

No man can be a patriot who feels neither joy nor shame at the idea of the honor or the infamy which his age and his country shall leave behind them.

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