Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/188

THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS systems — the one resting on the basis of servile or slave labor, the other on the basis of voluntary labor of freemen. The laborers who are enslaved are all negroes, or persons more or less purely of African deriva- tion. But this is only accidental. The principle of the system is that labor in every society, by whomsoever performed, is necessarily unin- tellectual, groveling, and base; and that the laborer, equally for his own good and for the welfare of the State, ought to be enslaved. The white laboring man, whether native or foreigner, is not enslaved only because he can not as yet be reduced to bondage. You need not be told now that the slave system is the older of the tv"o and that once it was uni- versal. The emancipation of our oati ancestors, Caucasians and Europeans as they were, hardly dates beyond a period of five hundred years. The great melioration of human society which modern times exhibit is mainly due to the in- complete substitution of the system of voluntary labor for the old one of servile labor v/hich has already taken place. This African slave system is one which, in its origin and its growth, has been altogether foreign from the habits of the races whi^-h colonized these States and estab- lished civilization here. It was introduced on this new continent as an engine of conquest and for the establishment of monarchical power by the Portuernese and the Spaniards, and was rapidly extended by them all over South 178