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Show 96 nous, expanding into no refreshing verdure, and sending no cheering whisper of a better lot. It is true that the free laborer may become a pauper; and so may the frea rich man, both of the North and the South. St"tll, our capitalists never dream of flying to slavery as a security arrainst the almshouse. Freedom undoubtedly h~s its perils. It offers nothing to the slothful and dissolute. Among a people left to seek their own good in their own way, some of all classes fail from vice, some from incapacity, some from misfortune. All classes will furnish members to the body of the poor. But in this country the number is small, and ought constantly to decrease. The evil, however lamentable, is not so remediless and spreading as to furnish a motive for reducing half the population to chains. Benevolence does much to mitigate it. The best minds are inquiring how it may be prevented, diminished, removed. It is giving excitement to a philanthropy which creates out of misfortune new bonds of union between man and man. Our slave-holding brethren, who tell us that the condition of the slave is better than that of the free laborer at the North, talk ignorantly and rashly. They do not, cannot know, what to us is matter of daily observation, that from the families of our farmers and mechanics have sprung our most distinguished men, men who have done most 97 for science, arts, letters, religion, and freedom; and that the noblest spirits among us would have been lost to their country and mankind, had the laborina class here been doomed to slavery. They d~ not know, what we rejoice to tell them, that this class partakes largely of the impulse given to the whole community; that the means of intellectual improvement are multiplying to the laborious as fast as to the opulent; that our most distin•uished citizens meet them as brethren, and comm~micate to them in public discourses their own most important acquisitions. Undoubtedly, tile Christian, republican spirit is not vwrking, even here, as it should. The more improved and prosperous classes have not yet learned that it is their great mission to elevate morally and intellectually the less advanced classes of the community; but the great truth is more and more recognised, and accordingly a new era may be said to be opening on society. It is said, however, that the slave, if not to be compared to the free laborer at the North, is in a happier condition than the Irish peasantry. Let this be granted. Let the security of the peasant's domestic relations, let his church, and his schoolhouse, and his faint hope of a better lot pass for nothing. Because Ireland is suffering from the misgovernment and oppression of ages, does it follow that a less grinding oppression is a good ? Besides, 7 |