Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (17434)	5/9/2004 9:11:05 PM
From: average joe	Respond to of 28931

If you get a chance read some of these letters... When the public sentiment of Europe speaks in tones of indignation of the system of American slavery, the common reply has been, "Look at your own lower classes." The apologists of slavery have pointed England to her own poor. They have spoken of the heathenish ignorance, the vice, the darkness, of her crowded cities -- nay, even of her agricultural districts. Now, in the first place, a country where the population is not crowded, where the resources of the soil are more than sufficient for the inhabitants -- a country of recent origin, not burdened with the worn-out institutions and clumsy lumber of past ages, ought not to be satisfied to do only as well as countries which have to struggle against all these evils. It is a poor defence for America to say to older countries, "We are no worse than you are." She ought to be infinitely better. But it will appear that the institution of slavery has produced not only heathenish, degraded, miserable slaves, but it produces a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable. The institution of slavery has accomplished the double feat, in America, not only of degrading and brutalising her black working classes, but of producing, notwithstanding a fertile soil, and abundant room, a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe. The way that it is done can be made apparent in a few words. 1. The distribution of the land into large plantations, and the consequent sparseness of settlement, make any system of common school education impracticable. 2. The same cause operates with regard to the preaching of the Gospel. 3. The degradation of the idea of labour, which results inevitably from enslaving the working class, operates to a great extent in preventing respectable working men of the middling classes from settling or remaining in slave States. Where carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons, are advertised every week with their own tools, or in company with horses, hogs, and other cattle, there is necessarily such an estimate of the labouring class that intelligent, self-respecting mechanics, such as abound in the free States, must find much that is annoying and disagreeable. They may endure it for a time, but with much uneasiness; and they are glad of the first opportunity of emigration. etext.virginia.edu