In the North, first in order of consideration is man, the individual man; next the family, made of those of common blood, and by far the strongest, as it is the most sacred of all institutions. Then comes the township, which presents the only spectacle of an absolute political democracy. For, here only, do citizens assemble in mass and vote, directly and not by representation. Next comes Society at large, or the mass of citizens grouped into States. And in Society, in the North, there are no classes except such as rise out of spontaneous forces. Wealth, experience, ability set men above their fellows. There they stand as long as there is a real superiority. But they stand there, not by legal force, nor to exercise any legal power, or to have one single privilege or prerogative, which does not belong just as much to every citizen clear down to the bottom. All that a class means in the North is, that when men have shown themselves strong and wise men give them honor for it. Death levels it all down again. Their children inherit nothing. They must earn for themselves. There is no division of society into orders, by which some have privilege and some have not, some have opportunity and advantages which others have not.
In the South, society is divided into two great and prominent classes—the ruling and the obeying—the thinking and the working. The labor of the South is performed by three million creatures who represent the heathen idea of man.
All the benefits that have accrued to man from Christianity, are appropriated and monopolized by the white population.
Here is a seam that no sophistry can sew up. Here is a society organized, not on an idea of equal rights, and of inequalities only as they spring from difference of worth, but on an idea of permanent, political, organized inequality among men. They carry it so far that the theory of Slave law regards the slave not as an inferior man, governed, for his own good as well as for the benefit of the society at large, but it pronounces him, in reiterated forms, not a man at all, but a chattel.
When a community of States, by the most potential voice of Law, says to the whole body of its laboring population, Ye are not men and shall not be; ye are chattels—it is absurd to speak about kind treatment—about happiness. It is about cattle that they are talking! Our vast body of laboring men do not yet feel the force of such a theory of human society. But, if that political system, which has openly been making such prodigious strides for the last fifty years, and effecting, secretly, a yet greater change in men's ideas of society and government, shall gain complete ascendancy, they, in their turn, and in due time will know and see the difference between a Republican Democracy and a Republican Aristocracy?
Out of such original and radical differences, there must flow a perpetual contrast and opposition of policies and procedures, in the operation of society and of business. We will select but a few, of many, subjects of contrast, Work, Education, Freedom of Speech and of the Press, and Religion.
I. Work. Among us, and from the beginning, Work has been honorable. It has been honorable to dig, to hew, to build, to reap, to wield the hammer at the forge, and the saw at the bench. It has been honorable because our people have been taught that each man is set to make the most of himself. The crown for every victory gained in a struggle of skill or industry over matter is placed upon the soul; and thus among a free people industry becomes education.
It is the peculiarity of Northern labor, that it thinks. It is intelligence working out through the hands. There is more real thought in a Yankee's hand than in a Southerner's head. This is not true of a class, or of single individuals, or of single States. It pervades the air. It is Northern public sentiment. It springs from our ideas of manhood. These influences, acting through generations, have been wrought into the very blood. It is in the stock. Go where you will a Yankee is a working creature. He is the honeybee of mankind. Only Work is royal among us. It carries the sceptre, and changes all nations by its touch, opening its treasures and disclosing its secrets.
But with all this industry, you shall find nowhere on earth so little drudging work as in the North. It is not the servitude of the hands to material nature. It is the glorious exercise of mind upon nature. They vex nature with incessant importunities. They are always prying, and thinking, and trying.
In California, gold is found in quartz formations. But in New England, and the free inventive North, in the geology of industry, gold is found everywhere—in rye straw and bonnets, in leather and stone, in wool, felts and cloths; in wood, in stone, and in very ice. It is wrapped up in the beggar's raiment, which unroll in our mills into paper—yesterday, a beggar's feculent rags; to-day, a newspaper, conveying the world's daily life into twenty thousand families. And so great are the achievements of labor that everybody honors it. It stands among us as an invisible dignity. Four spirits there are that rule in New England—religion, social virtue, intelligence, and work; and this last takes something from them all, and is their physical exponent. So that not only is work honored and honorable, but the want of it is an implied discredit. The presumption is always against a man who does not labor.