Speech #470034196

The case is a supposable one. although it fortunately did not in fact occur. that the property and employing classes. the persons who had nmoney to expend for either consumption or production purposes in both Great Britain and in the northern as well as in the southern American colonies. (now States.) might have been in 1775 dissatistied with the rates of wages they were being obliged to pay. and might have sought a remedy in importations of some part of the teeming millions of Africa and Asia. to be made use of under some one of the many forms and modifications of servitude. Without douibt the remedy would have been temporarily an nfflcient one. brt at what an immeasurably greater sacrifice of the perrnent and lasting interest of the Englishspeaking employers and property classes of 1775. and of their posterity. No less a sacrifice than that of the greater part. and perhaps of all of the inventions and discoveries of the Englishspeaking race dluring the past cenlturythe steamengine. thre spinninigjenny. the loom. the cottongin. the effectual use of coal in making iron. the railroad. the steamship. the electric telegraph. the steam printingpress. the sewingmachine. and the other innnmerable advances in science and artwhich have. during that memorable epoch. illustrated the powers of the human mind. subjected the forces of nature to the control and uses of maii. given dignity and enjoyment to life. and. looking merely to material and pecuniary results. have created an aggregate magnitude of wealth unknown and impossible to the highest degrees of African and Asiatic civilization. while they have secured to the wealthier classes and the wageearning classes a command over both necessaries and luxuries uknown ad impossible to former times under any form of civilization. The introduction of the cheap labor of an inferior race in 1775 would have arrested progress in every part of the British dominions as it (lid in the British southern colonies (now States) on this continent. The presence of an inferior race either inevitably expels the superior race or reduces it to the ways. modes of life. and all the other conditions of the newcomers.