The daily phoenix. [volume] (Columbia, S.C.) 1865-1878, 1865-08-23

plan to ask why we have failed, and
by what perverse influence we have
been led to waste that intellectual
capital upon which our material pros
perity depended wholly? But in this
sentence lies the whole keynote of
Our secret. The material resources of
people must depend wholly on the
degree in which they shall morally and
intellectually develope. And thus it
is that by law-not the mere dictum.
the brutuns .t,elmen-of a conqueror,
we lose our slaves, but by the absolute
laws of God, laid down ut the 1egin-
ming, which we have neglected, dis
obeyed or refused to learn. The
proof may all be adduced logically
from the lee Scriptd,- on record for six
Thousand years. We forfeit the right
to the slave when we lose the only
claim upon which the right was origi
nally founded. When we have edu-
Gated the negro to an equal skill with
ourselves in the culture of corn and
cotton, unless we can assert o supre-
macy over him in the essentials of art,
he may we'll be taken out from bond
age. When the Jews, under Egyp-
tian culture, could evolve from their
own masses men like Moses and
Aaron, fully equal to their Egyptian
masters, and capable of governing
their people, the race could no longer
be kept in bondage. Confning our
selves to agriculture, the result of
fifty years of training in that single
field, brought the negro slave into
close intellectual proximity to his
white master. If the master continued
nothing but an agriculturist, the dis
tane between the two races would
continue to lessen, and did lessen day
by day. At length, the master en-
ployed mis- own slave as driver or
overseer, or n1anager-cQpfded the
plantation to his skill and superin-
tendence, and became himself an
idler, an absentee, ncglecting his in
terests rs well as his duties in his ap-
petites for pleasure, and thus forfeited
his whole claim to superiority over the
subject race, and in doing so, accord
ing to the moral law, forfeited his
right.
There are thousands of negroes who
were as good. if not better planters
and farmers, than their owners or the
overseers put over them. Owners and
overseers, in thousands of cases, were
grossly ignorant of MI the laws of
culture, never Improved their lands,
never improved themselves, were con-
tent to hunt and shoot, and drink aad
game, and wander off to all manner of
places and indulgences, until sensual
ism proved too strong to be over
thrown by any exercise of will or
effort. Here were our tyrannies; not
the slaves, not the cotton, but in the
bad trainings of our people; in the
policies of the state; the
vicious and destructive system, which
concentrated all our capital upon ag-
the most inferior of all the
arts, to the exclusion of all others.
The arts, properly, must-exist togeth-
er, if you would have a nation pros
porous. They are intimatelyblended,
and kindred, and must be mutually
Lord Bacon describes
agriculture, commerce and manufac-
lures, as the three mighty vessels of
State, which, rolling together with
corresponslve motion, bring in wealth
to nation like the rushing of spring
tide. Agriculture, alone, is always
weak and feeble. Agricultural people
are more ignorant than all others,
except the pastoral and nomadic. NJ
purely agricultural people that th6
world has ever known, from the first
dawnings of time, have ever produced
literature, art or science. Let us de-
velope from the two sources of capital
still left us. the soul and the soil.
But we must lift the soul above the
soil and keep it up lifted. How shall
we do that? By the industry, the fos-
tering of all the arts; by patient work
ing with intelligence; by good educa-
ton, of which work is the basis; by a
modest, pressing progress, in our rigi6
callings, according to our endowments;
by refusing competence in the pro-