Doubtless men might have been created equal to each other in every
respect, with the same mental capacity, the same physical ability, with
like inheritances of good or bad qualities, and born into exactly similar
conditions, and not dependent on each other. But men never were so
created and born, so far as we have any record of them, and by analogy we
have no reason to suppose that they ever will be. Inequality is the most
striking fact in life. Absolute equality might be better, but so far as
we can see, the law of the universe is infinite diversity in unity; and
variety in condition is the essential of what we call progress--it is, in
fact, life.
It sometimes seems as if half the American people were losing the power
to apply logical processes to the ordinary affairs of life.
It is human nature, it is the lesson of history, that real wrongs,
unredressed, grow into preposterous demands. Men are much like nature in
action; a little disturbance of atmospheric equilibrium becomes a
cyclone, a slight break in the levee a crevasse with immense destructive
power.
EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO
But slavery brought about one result, and that the most difficult in the
development of a race from savagery, and especially a tropical race, a
race that has always been idle in the luxuriance of a nature that
supplied its physical needs with little labor.
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