Since the dawn of history the lands of freedom have produced fruits and flowers that refused to thrive on any other soil. For several centuries civilization was confined to a small country of republics: Attic and Theban Greece. “Study the wonders of that age,” says Byron to his friend Trelawney, “and compare them with the best ever done under masters.” Switzerland, in spite of its rocky soil, has for centuries been the happiest, as well as the freest, country of Europe. The prosperity of the United States of America, since the establishment of their independence, stands unparalleled in the history of the last eighteen hundred years; and, moreover, the degree of that prosperity has been locally proportioned to the degree of social freedom, and has begun to become general only since the general abolition of slavery. Freedom blesses the poorest soil, as despotism blights the most fertile, and it is only an apparent exception from that rule that Italy continued to flourish during the first two centuries of the empire. The change in the form of government was at first nominal, rather than real, and under the rule of Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, Rome enjoyed more real liberty than many a so-called republic of modern times. When despotism became a systematic and chronic actuality, the sun of fortune was soon eclipsed, and the social climate became as unfavorable to art and literature as to valor and patriotism. Personal independence is a not less essential condition of individual happiness. Bondage in any form, and of silken or gilded, as well as of iron, fetters, is incompatible with the development of the highest mental and moral faculties. The genius of Poland and modern Italy has produced its best fruit in exile. The progress of modern civilization dates only from the time when knowledge once more flourished in a Republic of Letters; and for a thousand years the monastery system of medieval literature produced hardly a single work of genius. Within the period of the last three or four generations the sun of freedom has ripened better and more abundant fruit in any single decade than the dungeon-air of despotism during a series of centuries. All foreign travelers agree in admiring (or condemning) the early mental development of American children, who have a chance to exercise their intellectual faculties in an area untrammeled by the barriers of caste divisions and social restraints. They may yield to the pupils of the best European colleges in special branches of scholarship, but in common sense, general intelligence, general information, in self-respect, in practical versatility and self-dependence, an American boy of twelve is, as a rule, more than a match for a continental-European boy of sixteen; and the same holds good of the average intelligence and self-dependence of our country population. With the rarest exceptions the political economists of our Southern states agree that the agricultural negro as a freeman is a more