It was introduced on this continent as an engine of conquest, and
for the establishment of monarchical power, by the Portuguese and the
Spaniards, and was rapidly extended by them all over South America,
Central America, Louisiana, and Mexico. Its legitimate fruits are seen
in the poverty, imbecility, and anarchy which now pervade all Portuguese
and Spanish America. The free-labor system is of German extraction, and
it was established in our country by emigrants from Sweden, Holland,
Germany, Great Britain and Ireland. We justly ascribe to its influences
the strength, wealth, greatness, intelligence, and freedom, which the
whole American people now enjoy. One of the chief elements of the value
of human life is freedom in the pursuit of happiness. The slave system
is not only intolerable, unjust, and inhuman, toward the laborer, whom,
only because he is a laborer, it loads down with chains and converts
into merchandise, but is scarcely less severe upon the freeman, to whom,
only because he is a laborer from necessity, it denies facilities for
employment, and whom it expels from the community because it cannot
enslave and convert into merchandise also. It is necessarily improvident
and ruinous, because, as a general truth, communities prosper and
flourish, or droop and decline, in just the degree that they practise
or neglect to practise the primary duties of justice and humanity.
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