n New York 1 in every 131,
in the South and Southwest 1 in every 12 of the native white adults.
(Comp. p. 153.)

These official statistics enable me, then, again to say that slavery is
hostile to the progress of wealth and education, to science and
literature, to schools, colleges, and universities, to books and
libraries, to churches and religion, to the press, and therefore to free
government; hostile to the poor, keeping them in want and ignorance;
hostile to labor, reducing it to servitude, and decreasing two thirds
the value of its products; hostile to morals, repudiating among slaves
the marital and parental condition, classifying them by law as chattels,
darkening the immortal soul, and making it a crime to teach millions of
human beings to read or write. Surely such a system is hostile to
civilization, which consists in the education of the masses of the
people of a country, and not of the few only. A State, one third of
whose population are slaves, classified by law as chattels, and
forbidden all instruction, and nearly one fifth of whose adult whites
cannot read or write, is semi-civilized, however enlightened may be the
ruling classes. If a highly educated chief or parliament governed China
or Dahomey, they would still be semi-civilized or barbarous countries,
however enlightened their rulers might be. The real discord between the
North and the South, is not only the difference between freedom and
slavery, but between civilization and barbarism caused by slavery. When
we speak of a civilized _nation_, we mean the masses of the people, and
not the government or rulers only. The enlightenment of the _people_ is
the true criterion of civilization, and any community that falls below
this standard, is barbarous or semi-civilized. In countries where kings
or oligarchies rule, the government may be maintained, (however
unjustly,) without educating the masses; but, in a republic, or popular
government, this is impossible; and the deluded masses of the South
never could have been driven into this rebellion, but for the ignorance
into which they had been plunged by slavery; nor is there any remedy for
the evil but emancipation. If, then, we would give stability and wisdom
to the government, and perpetuity to the Union, we must abolish slavery,
which withholds education and enlightenment from the masses of the
people, who, with us, control the policy of the nation.

With our only cause of ignorance and poverty among th