Thomas R. Whitney was a 19th century silversmith who wrote the magnum opus of the Know Nothing Party called A Defense of the American Policy.

- Source:
Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian magazine
Jan 26, 2017

Thomas R. Whitney, A Defence of the American Policy (1856)

Chapter 3, Human Equality — Taxation and Representation

[snip]

To declare equality in the contracted, strict sense of the term would be to declare that mind and matter are identical. What is equality but stagnation? Equality is not found, and cannot be attained in the moral, social, physical, or elemental universe. Inequality is the source of action; action is the source of life, thought, fruition. It is attraction and repulsion that cause the electric particles to vibrate, and the needle to point the north.

Equalize the attractive power, and the compass becomes inert, the chemistry of vegetation is no more, and the principle of life ceases to act. It is on the unequal ground that the pure steam meanders, or rushes onward in the full vigor of vitality; but in the equilibrium of the stagnant pool the waters become fetid and repulsive.

If the earth were an even plain, how the eye would weary over it! Draw the misty vapors for ever from the sky, and it would lose its grandeur. Let the hues of the flowers be equalized into a single tint, and there would be no attraction to please the sense of the optic nerves. So is it in the moral and social world.

It is the inequality in desires, necessities, taste, genius, station, talent, power, and mind, that calls forth the energy of man, and causes him to invent, achieve, amass, adorn, aspire, or toil, and so gives zest to life, and impetus to the on-rolling car of progress.

Establish equality in these things, and a moral paralysis would pervade the earth.