e national expense for the benefit
of the people: so that the people could, understandingly, apply the
corrective for evils that might be found to exist in one locality, and
profit by a knowledge of the greater prosperity that might be found to
exist in another locality.

Up to that time, the non-slaveholding States affirmed, and the
slaveholding States tacitly admitted, that by this test, the
slaveholding States must suffer in the comparison, in some important
items. The facts which belong to the subject, are now before the world,
in the census of 1850.

It is my purpose to compare some of the most important of these facts,
which have a bearing on this subject. I shall take for the most part,
the six New England States, on one side, and the five old slave States,
(extending from, and including Maryland and Georgia,) on the other side,
for the comparison.

I select _these States_, not because they are the richest, (for they are
not,) but because they all lie on the Atlantic side of the
Union--because they were settled at or near the same time--because they
have (within a fraction) an equal free population--and because it has
been constantly affirmed, and almost universally admitted, that the
advantages of freedom, and the disadvantages of slavery, have been more
perfectly developed in these two sections, than they have been anywhere
else in the United States. There have been no controlling circumstances
at any time, since their first settlement, to neutralize the advantages
of freedom on the one side, or to modify the evils of slavery on the
other. Their mutual tendencies, without let or hindrance, have been in
full and free operation for more than two centuries. This is surely a
length of time quite sufficient to test the question now in controversy
between the North and the South, as to the evils of slavery.

The first facts I shall examine are those which throw light on the
progress made in each of these two localities in religion. Of all the
evils ascribed to slavery by the free men of the North, none equals, in
their estimation, its deleterious tendency upon _religion_ and _morals_.
Indeed, such is the _moral character_, ascribed by many at the North,
who call themselves Christians, to a Southern slaveholder, that no
degree of personal piety, of which he can be the subject, will bring
them to admit that he is any thing but a God-abhorred miscreant, utterly
unfit for the association of honorable men, much less C