later stages. * * * I mean, so to speak, that the garment of laws, customs, and political institutions, which each society weaves for itself, is constantly tending to become too tight as society develops. * * * Modern civilization owes its superiority to the growth of equality with the growth of association. * * * Civilization is co-operation. Union and liberty are its factors. The great extension of association—not alone in the growth of larger and denser communities, but in the increase of commerce and the manifold exchanges which knit each community together and link them with other though widely separate communities. * * * the advances in security of property and person, in individual liberty, and towards democratic government—advances, in short, towards the recognition of the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—it is these that make our modern civilization so much greater, so much higher, than any that has gone before. It is these that have * * * increased productive power by a thousand great inventions. * * * From first to last, slavery, like every other denial of the natural equality of men, has hampered and prevented progress. Just in proportion as slavery plays an important part in the social organization does improvement cease. That in the classical world slavery was so universal, is undoubtedly the reason why the mental activity * * * never hit on any of the great discoveries and inventions which distinguish modern civilization. No slave holding people ever were an inventive people. * * * To freedom alone is given the spell of power which summons the genii in whose keeping are the treasures of earth and the viewless forces of the air. * * * To turn a republican government into a despotism the basest
