favor of personal independence
springing from industry, that a native-born American citizen had
rather die than go to an Alms-House. Foreigners are our staple
paupers. Our charity feeds the poor wretches whom foreign slavery has
crippled and cast upon us. But the whole South is a vast work-house
for the slave while young, and a vast alms-house for him when old, and
neither young or old, is he permitted to feel the responsibility for
labor. And this, too, explains the _apparent_ advantage which the
South has over the North in the matter of pauperism and distress. The
northern system intends to punish those who will not work. It it not a
system calculated for slaves nor for lazy men. If indolence comes
under it, it will take the penalty of not working. And nowhere else in
the world is the penalty of indolence, and even of shiftlessness, so
terrible as in the North, as nowhere else is the remuneration of a
virtuous industry so ample and so widely diffused.

II. There is just as marked a contrast upon the subject of education,
and especially of Common Schools. In the North we have COMMON Schools.
This is more than a School. It is more than a public school. It is a
_Common_ School, in distinction from a _select_, or class school. It
is a public provision for bringing together, upon a perfect equality,
the children of the rich and the poor, the noble and ignoble, the high
and the low. It is a provision of our institutions, by which every
generation is led to a line and made to start equal and together.
There will be inequality enough as soon as men get into life. Some
shoot ahead; some, like dull sailors in a fleet, are dropped behind,
and men are scattered all along the ocean. But the _Common_ School
gathers up their children and brings them all back again to take a new
start together. Thus our schools are not mere whetstones to the
intellect; they are institutions for evening up society; they resist
the tendency to separation into classes, which grows with the
prosperity of a community; they bind together, in cordial sympathy,
all classes of citizens. For nothing is more tenacious than schoolday
remembrances, and the last things that we forget are playmates and
schoolmates.

The South may have schools. But never _Common_ Schools. The South has
no _common_ people. There can be States, there, but never
_Commonwealths_. There is no _common_ ground, where the theory of
society grades men upon a perpendicular scale. It is a