is respect, then, on philosophical grounds, the Cotton
dynasty is not likely to favor the education of the masses. Again, it
is undoubtedly the interest of the man who has not, that all possible
branches of industry should be open to his labor, as rendering that
labor of greater value; but the whole tendency of the Cotton monopoly is
to blight all branches of industry in the Cotton States save only that
one. General intelligence might lead the poor white to suspect this fact
of an interest of his own antagonistic to the policy of the Cotton King,
and therefore general intelligence is not part of that monarch's policy.
This the philosophers of the Cotton dynasty fairly avow and class high
among those dangers against which it behooves them to be on their guard.
They theorize thus:--

"The great mass of our poor white population begin to understand that
they have rights, and that they, too, are entitled to some of the
sympathy which falls upon the suffering. They are fast learning that
there is an almost infinite world of industry opening before them, by
which they can elevate themselves and their families from wretchedness
and ignorance to competence and intelligence. It is this great upheaving
of our masses which we have to fear, so far as our institutions are
concerned."[B]

[Footnote B: _De Bow's Review_, January, 1850. Quoted in Olmsted's _Back
Country_, p. 451.]

Further, the policy of the Cotton King, however honestly in theory it
may wish to encourage it, renders general education and consequent
intelligence an impossibility. A system of universal education is made
for a laboring population, and can be sustained only among a laboring
population; but if that population consist of slaves, universal
education cannot exist. The reason is simple; for the children of all
must be educated, otherwise the scholars will not support the schools.
It is an absolute necessity of society that in agricultural districts
cultivated by slave-labor the free population should be too sparsely
scattered to support a system of schools, even on starvation wages for
the cheapest class of teachers.

Finally, though it is a subject not necessary now to discuss, the effect
of the Cotton monopoly and dynasty in depressing the majority of the
whites into a species of labor competition in the same branch of
industry as the blacks, because the only branch open to all, can
hardly have a self-respect-inspiring influence on that portion of the
c