the government will go on, and the community be prosperous, be they decided never so badly,—­and if decided badly, the decision will he reversed; but let the people become ignorant and debased, and all the checks and balances and wise regulations which the ingenuity of man could in centuries devise would, at best, but for a short space defer the downfall of a republic.  A well-founded republic can, then, be destroyed only by destroying its people,—­its decay need be looked for only in the decay of their intelligence; and any form of thought or any institution tending to suppress education or destroy intelligence strikes at the very essence of the government, and constitutes a treason which no law can meet, and for which no punishment is adequate.

Education, then, as universally diffused as the elements of God, is the life-blood of our body politic.  The intelligence of the people is the one great fact of our civilization and our prosperity,—­it is the beating heart of our age and of our land.  It is education alone which makes equality possible without anarchy, and liberty without license.  It is this—­which makes the fundamental principles of our Declaration of Independence living realities in New England, while in France they still remain the rhetorical statement of glittering generalities.  From this source flow all our possibilities.  Without it, the equality of man is a pretty figure of speech; with it, democracy is possible.  This is a path beaten by two hundred years of footprints, and while we walk it we are safe and need fear no evil; but if we diverge from it, be it for never so little, we stumble, and, unless we quickly retrace our steps, we fall and are lost.  The tutelary goddess of American liberty should be the pure marble image of the Professor’s Yankee school-mistress.  Education is the fundamental support of our system.  It was education which made us free, progressive, and conservative; and it is education alone which can keep us so.

With this fact clearly established, the next inquiry should be as to the bearing and policy of the Cotton dynasty as touching this question of general intelligence.  It is a mere truism to say that the cotton-culture is the cause of the present philosophical and economical phase of the African question.  Throughout the South, whether justly or not, it is considered as well settled that cotton can be profitably raised only by a forced system of labor.  This theory has been denied by some writers, and, in experience, is certainly subject to some marked exceptions; but undoubtedly it is the creed of the Cotton dynasty, and must here, therefore, be taken for true.[A] With this theory, the Southern States are under a direct inducement, in the nature of a bribe, to the amount of the annual profit on their cotton-crop, to see as many perfections and as few imperfections as possible in the system of African slavery, and to follow it out unflinchingly into all its logical necessities.