Many consider the American institution of self-government as a new
experiment; and European serviles and American slave oligarchs utter
fearful forebodings that the experiment is already a failure. But the
prophecy only expresses their desires. For this so-called experiment is
but the natural, progressive development of man, and for this reason
proves itself every day more and more successful in the Free States.
The kingdoms and nations of the old world are now diligently studying
this experiment of freedom, and trying to appropriate its beneficent
results. Agents of European governments uninterruptedly investigate the
system of free communal schools, the manufactures, the inventions, the
multifarious industrial and agricultural progress of the Free States.
But no government sends its messengers to study out the condition of
slave plantations, slave huts, or slave pens; for they know well that
by the action of self-government and universal suffrage, qualitative
and quantitative knowledge is more generally spread, and has reached
a far higher grade in the American Free States than among all the
militant oligarchs and knight-errants of slavery the world over.
An experiment generally proves successful if made with properly adapted
and unadulterated materials. A structure raised on a treacherous
foundation and built with rotten materials must fall. It is an
experiment altogether new to the human race to construct a society
and government with chattelhood as an integral element. It is an
experiment to attempt to bring down horrified humanity on its knees
to the worship of chattelhood and the devilish slave traffic. Such an
experiment is now being tried by the apostles of slavery; and that too,
though morality, civilization and history have unanimously and forever
pronounced the sentence of condemnation against holding property in
man. The civilized and Christian world of both hemispheres and every
race unanimously awarded to John Brown the crown of a martyr, who fell
in the cause of human liberty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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