affect beneficially the twenty-seven millions of people who are obliged
to obtain subsistence through personal industry; theirs is the great
cause of white humanity in its shirt-sleeves; and it behooves the
National Government to take care of that cause, and to foster it; and
not to submit to the narrow selfishness of a few slaveholders.'

It may readily be seen that this controversy, growing out of the
opposite theories of selfish slaveholders on the one hand, and a spirit
of beneficence, blended with the idea of a wide-spread advantage on the
other, not only involves directly the demerits of slavery, in its
prejudicial effect on the non-slaveholding population South, but also
the great question of raising up skilled labor in all the States. It is
thus clearly demonstrated that our national policy should be exempt from
the control of an arrogant and selfish class. Slaveholders have had
little sympathy with the great bulk of the white people in the Union; at
most, they have never manifested it. Few of them can be trusted
politically, where a broad industrial policy is concerned. No one is
better aware than the political slaveholder of the crushing effect of
slavery on the interests of the non-slaveholding population in the slave
States: hence their jealousy of this population as a voting, governing
power. The Southern political mind, connected with slaveholding, is
astute when sharpened by jealousy. There is no phase in political
economy, bearing on the disparity of classes in the South, that has not
been taken into the account and analyzed. The fear with slaveholders has
been, that the great majority, composed of the white laboring population
South, would become able to subject matters to the same scrutinizing
analysis.

It would be difficult to convince the American people that slavery is
not 'the skeleton in their closet.' Any one who has encountered for
years the pro-slavery spirit; who has watched it through its
unscrupulous deviations from rectitude, morally, socially, and
politically, will have been dull of comprehension not to have
appreciated its atrocious disposition. Its great instrumentality in the
management of Southern masses, consists not only of a disregard, but of
a positive interdict of the principles of civil liberty, in all matters
wherein the prejudicial effects of slavery might directly, or by
implication, be disclosed. It is true, people are permitted to adulate
slavery--so they are allowed to a