foundations.  But, having made this class the vast majority of the master-caste, what are the policy and tendency of the Cotton dynasty as touching them?  The story is almost too old to bear even the shortest repetition.  Philosophically, it is a logical necessity of the Cotton dynasty that it should be opposed to universal intelligence;—­economically, it renders universal intelligence an impossibility.  That slavery is in itself a positive good to society is a fundamental doctrine of the Cotton dynasty, and a proposition not necessary to be combated here; but, unfortunately, universal intelligence renders free discussion a necessity, and experience tells us that the suppression of free discussion is necessary to the existence of slavery.  We are but living history over again.  The same causes have often existed before, and they have drawn after them the necessary effects.  Other peoples, at other times, as well as our Southern brethren at present, have felt, that the suppression of general discussion was necessary to the preservation of a prized and peculiar institution.  Spain, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland have all, at different times, experienced the forced suppression of some one branch of political or religious thought.  Their histories have recorded the effect of that suppression; and the rule to be deduced therefrom is simply this:  If the people among whom such suppression is attempted are ignorant, and are kept so as part of a system, the attempt may be successful, though in its results working destruction to the community;—­if, however, they are intelligent, and the system incautiously admits into itself any plan of education, the attempt at suppression will be abandoned, as the result either of policy or violence.  In this respect, then, on philosophical grounds, the Cotton dynasty is not likely to favor the education of the masses.  Again, it is undoubtedly the interest of the man who has not, that all possible branches of industry should be open to his labor, as rendering that labor of greater value; but the whole tendency of the Cotton monopoly is to blight all branches of industry in the Cotton States save only that one.  General intelligence might lead the poor white to suspect this fact of an interest of his own antagonistic to the policy of the Cotton King, and therefore general intelligence is not part of that monarch’s policy.  This the philosophers of the Cotton dynasty fairly avow and class high among those dangers against which it behooves them to be on their guard.  They theorize thus:—­

“The great mass of our poor white population begin to understand that they have rights, and that they, too, are entitled to some of the sympathy which falls upon the suffering.  They are fast learning that there is an almost infinite world of industry opening before them, by which they can elevate themselves and their families from wretchedness and ignorance to competence and intelligence.  It is this great upheaving of our masses which we have to fear, so far as our institutions are concerned."[B]