We are not propagandists of slavery. The highest wish of Virginia with reference to it was, that now it had been fastened on her against her remonstrances by others, she should be let alone to manage it as she judged the best: a right which had been solemnly pledged to her by her present aggressors. We had no desire to force it on others, or to predict its universal prevalence, as the best organization of society. But having claimed that the Word of God and publick justice authorize it, we admit that it is reasonable we should meet those who assert economical and social results of it so evil, as to render it in credible that a wise and benevolent God should sanction such a mischief. We hope to show that slavery, instead of being wasteful, impoverishing, and mischievous, is so far useful and benevolent as to vindicate the divine wisdom in ordaining it, and to show that we were wisely content with our condition so far as this relation of labour and capital was concerned.

We would also urge this preliminary remark: that the economical effects of American slavery have usually been argued from an amazingly unreasonable point of view. Our enemies persist in discussing it as an election 296 to be made between a system of labour by christianized, enlightened, free yeomen of the same race, on one hand; and a system of labour by African slaves on the other; as though the South had any such election in its power! It was not a thing for us to decide, whether we should have these Africans, or civilized, free, white labour; the former were here; here, not by the choice of our forefathers, but forced upon us by the unprincipled cupidity of the slave-trading ancestors of the Abolitionists of Old and New England who now revile us; forced upon us against the earnest protest of Virginia. Did Abolitionists ever propose a practical mode of removing them, and supplying their places, which would not inflict on both parties more mischief than slavery occasion? They should have showed us some way to charm the four millions of Africans among us, away to some happy Utopia, where they might be more comfortable than we made them; and to repair the shock caused by the abstraction of all this productive labour. Until they did this, the question was not whether it would be wisest for a legislator creating a totally new community, to form it like Scotland or New England; or like Virginia. The true question was, these Africans being here, and there being no humane or practicable way to remove them, what shall be done with them? If the social condition of Virginia exhibited points of inferiority in its system of labour, to that of its rivals, the true cause of the evil was to be sought in the presence of the Africans among us, not in his enslavement. We shall indeed assert, and prove, that these points of inferiority were vastly fewer and smaller than our enemies represent. But, we emphatically repeat, 297 the source of the evils apparent in our industrial system was the presence among us of four millions of heterogeneous pagan, uncivilized, indolent, and immoral people; and for that gigantic evil, slavery was, in part at least, the lawful, the potent, the beneficent remedy. Without this, who cannot see that such an incubus must have oppressed and blighted every interest of the country? Such an infusion must have tainted the sources of our prosperity. It would have been a curse sufficient to paralyze the industry, to corrupt the morals, and to crush the development of any people on earth, to have such a race spread abroad among them like the frogs of Egypt. And that the South not only delivered itself from this fate, but civilized and christianized this people, making them the most prosperous and comfortable peasantry in the world, developed a magnificent agriculture, and kept pace with the progress of its gigantic rival, attests at once the energy of our people, and the wisdom and righteousness of the expedient by which all this has been accomplished
§ 1. Slavery and Republican Government.

Intelligent men at the South found something to reconcile them to their condition, in the wholesome influence of their form of labour, upon their republican institutions. The effect of slavery to make the temper of the ruling caste more honourable, self-governed, reflective, courteous, and chivalrous, and to foster in them an intense love of, and pride in, their free institutions, has been already asserted, and substantiated by resistless facts. The testimony of these facts is concurrent with that of all history. But those qualities 298 are just the ones which fit a people for beneficent self-government. Again: our system disposed, at one potent touch, of that great difficulty which has beset all free governments: the difficulty of either entrusting the full franchises of the ruling caste to, or refusing them to, the moneyless class. The Word of God tells us that the poor shall always be with us. Natural differences of capacity, energy, and thrift, will always cause one part to distance the other part of the society, in the race of acquisition; and the older and denser any population becomes, the larger will be the penniless class, and the more complete their destitution as compared with the moneyed class. Shall they be refused all participation in the suffrage and powers of government? Then, by what means shall the constitution make them secure against the iniquities of class-legislation, which wickedly and selfishly sacrifices their interests and rights to the ruling class? And yet more: by what argument can they be rendered content in their political disfranchisement, when they are of the same race, colour, and class, with their unauthorized oppressors, save as money makes an artificial distinction? The perpetual throes and reluctations of the oppressed class against the oppressors, will agitate and endanger any free government; as witness the strifes of the conservative and radical parties in England, and the slumbering eruptions which the ideas of the democrats of 1848 have kindled under every throne in Western Europe. But on the other hand, if the full franchises of the ruling class be conceded to the moneyless citizens, they seize the balance of power, and virtually hold the reins over the rights, property, and lives of the moneyed 299 classes. But the qualities which have made them continue penniless in a liberal government, together with the pressure of immediate hardship, destitution, ignorance and passion, will ever render them most unsafe hands to hold this power. The man who has "the wolf at his door," who knows not where to-morrow's dinner for his wife and babes is to be obtained, is no safe man to be entrusted with power over others' property, and submitted to all the arts and fiery passions of the demagogue. The inevitable result will be, that his passions will drive him, under the pressure of his destitution, to some of those forms of agrarianism or legislative plunder, by which order and economical prosperity are blighted; and society is compelled, like democratic France and New England, to take refuge from returning anarchy and barbarism, in the despotism of a single will. This truth cannot be more justly stated than in the language of Lord Macaulay, himself once an ardent advocate of British Reform. If the democratic States of America seemed, for a time, to offer an exception to these tendencies, it proves nothing; for in those States, the intense demand for labour, the cheapness of a virgin soil, and the rapid growth of a new and sparse population, rendered the working of the law, for a time, imperceptible. But even there, it had begun to work with a portentous power. Witness the violence and frightful mutations of their parties, the loathsome prevalence of demagogueism, and the great party of free-soil, which is but a form of agrarianism reaching out its plundering hand against the property class across Mason's and Dixon's lines, instead of the property class at home. So completely had the danger we have 300 described been verified, even in these new and prosperous communities, that the moment a serious strain came upon their institutions, the will of the mob burst over constitutions and publick ethics like a deluge, and the pretended republicks rushed into a centralized despotism, with a speed and force which astounded the world. All the pleas of universal suffrage have received a damning and final refutation, from the events of this revolution.

But the solution which Southern institutions gave to this great dilemma of republicks was happy and potent. The moneyless labouring class was wholly disfranchised of political powers, and thus disarmed of its powers of mischief. Yet this was effected without injustice to them, or cruelty; because they were at the same time made parts of the families of the ruling class; and ensured an active protection and competent maintenance, by law, and by motives of affection and self-interest in the masters; which experience proved to be more beneficent in practice to the labouring class, than any political expedient of free countries. The tendency of our African slavery was to diminish, at the same time, the numbers and destitution of the class of white moneyless men, so as to render them a harmless element in the State. It did this by making for them a wider variety of lucrative industrial pursuits; by making acquisition easier for white people; by increasing the total of property, that is to say, of values held as property, vastly, through the addition of the labour of the Africans, and by diffusing a general plenty and prosperity. We very well know that anti-slavery men are accustomed to assert the contrary of all this: but we know also, that 301 they affirm that whereof they know nothing. The census returns of the anti-slavery government of the United States itself stubbornly refute them; showing that the number and average wealth of the property classes at the South were relatively larger, and that white pauperism and destitution were relatively vastly smaller, than at the North. But the violent abolition of slavery here has exploded into thin air every sophism by which it has been argued that it was adverse to the interests of the non-slaveholding whites. The latter have been taught by a hard experience, to know, with a painful completeness of conviction before which the old anti-slavery arguments appear insolent and mocking madness, that they are more injured than the slaveholders. They see, that while the late masters are reduced from country gentlemen to yeomen landholders, they are reduced from a thrifty, reputable middle class, to starving competitors for day labour with still more starving free negroes. The honest abolitionist (if there is such a thing) needs only to take the bitter testimony of the non-slaveholding whites of the South, to unlearn forever this part of his theory. Thus did African slavery among us solve this hard problem; and place before us a hopeful prospect of a long career of freedom and stability.

The comparative history of the free and slaveholding commonwealths of the late United States substantiates every word of the above. The South, as a section, has never, from the foundation of the government, committed itself to any project of unrighteous class legislation, such as tariffs, sectional bounties, or agrarian plunderings of the public domain. The North has been perpetually studying such attempts. The South has 302 ever been remarked, (and strange to say, often twitted,) for the stability and consistency of its political parties. The Northern States have been "all things by turns, and nothing long," save that they have been ever steady in their devotion to their plans of legislative plunder. The South has been a stranger to mobs, rebellions, and fanaticism. When, for instance, the wicked crotchet of Know-nothingism was invented, it seized the brains of the North like an infection. It carried all before it until it came to Virginia, the first of the Southern States which it essayed to enter, when the old Commonwealth quietly arose and placed her foot upon its neck, and the monster expired at once. From the day Virginia cast her vote against it, it never gained another victory, either North or South. But the crowning evidence of the superior stability of our freedom was presented during the recent war. While its stress upon Northern institutions crushed them at once into a pure despotism, the South sustained the tremendous ordeal with the combined energy of a monarchy and the equity of a liberal republick. There was no mob law; no terrorizing of dissentients, no intimidations at elections, nor meddling with their purity and freedom, no infringement of rights by class legislation, no riots nor mobs, save one or two small essays generated by foreigners, and no general suspension of the Habeas Corpus, until the pressure of the war had virtually converted the whole country into a camp: and this, even then, was only enacted by the constitutional authority of the Congress. The liberty of the press and of religion was untouched during the whole struggle. Let the contrast be now drawn. Shall the tree be known by its fruits? 303

We believe, therefore, that we have no cause, in this respect, to lament the condition which Providence had assigned us, in placing this African Race among us. We do not envy the political condition of our detractors, Yankee and British radicals; of the former with their colluvies gentium, the off-scouring of all the ignorance and discontent of Europe, and their frantic agrarianism, which will turn, so soon as it has exhausted its expected prey from the homesteads of Southern planters, to ravage at home; and of the latter, with their disorganizing theories of human right, subversive of every bulwark of the time-honored British Constitution, and their increasing mass of turbulent pauperism.
§ 2. Slavery and Malthusianism.

Taking mankind as they are, and not as we may desire them to be, domestic slavery offered the best relation which has yet been found, between labour and capital. It is not asserted that it would be best for a Utopia, where we might imagine the humblest citizen virtuous, intelligent, and provident. But there are no such societies on earth. The business of the legislator, whether human or divine, is with mankind as they are; and while he adapts his institutions to their defects, so as to avoid making them impracticable or mischievous, he should also shape them to elevate and reform as far as possible. The legislator, therefore, in devising a frame of society, should adapt it to a state in which the rich are selfish and the poor indolent and improvident. For, after all that has been boasted of human improvement, this is usually man's condition. Now, in adjusting social institutions, it is all-important to secure 304 physical comfort; because in a state of physical misery and degradation, moral and intellectual improvement are hopeless; and the business of the legislator is more especially to take care of the weak: the strong will take care of themselves. Property is the chief element of political strength; it is this which gives to individuals power in society; for "money answereth all things;" it commands for its possessor whatever he needs for his physical comfort and safety. The great desideratum in all benign legislation is to sustain the class which has no property, against the social depression and physical suffering to which they always tend. That there will always be such a class, at least till the millennium, is certain, for reasons already stated. Now all civilized communities exhibit a natural law which tends to depress the physical condition of those who have no property, who are, usually, the laboring classes. That law is the tendency of population to increase. The area of a country grows no larger, while the number of people in it is perpetually increasing, unless that tendency is already arrested by extreme physical evils. The same acres have, therefore, more and more mouths to feed, and backs to clothe. Consequently, each person must receive a smaller and smaller share of the total proceeds of the earth. The demand perpetually increases in proportion to the supply; and therefore the price of those productions rises, as compared with the price of labour. Hence in every flourishing community, the relative proportion between the price of land, its rents, and the food and clothing which it produces, on the one hand, and the price of manual labour on the other, is perpetually, though slowly, changing. The 305 former rises, the latter sinks. Improvements in agriculture and the arts, extensive conquests, emigrations, or some other cause, may for a time arrest, or even reverse, this process; but such is the general law, and the constant tendency. The very prosperity and growth of the community work this result. The owners of land become richer: those who live by labour become poorer. Physical depression works moral depression, and these overcrowded and under-fed labourers, becoming more reckless, are familiarized with a lower standard of comfort, and continue to increase. This law has wrought in every growing nation on the globe which is without domestic slavery. It is felt in Great Britain, in spite of her vast colonies, where she has disgorged her superfluous mouths and hands, to occupy and feed them on virgin soils: in spite of her conquests, which have centred in her lap the wealth of continents. It has begun to work in the Northern States of America, notwithstanding the development of the arts, and the proximity of the Great West. Every where it reduces the quantity or quality of food and raiment which a day's labour will earn, and perpetually tends to approximate that lowest grade at which the labouring classes can vegetate, multiply, and toil.

What, now, is the remedy? Not agrarianism: this could only aggravate the evil by taking away the incentive to effort, in making its rewards insecure. Not conquest of new territory: the world is now all occupied; and conquest from our neighbours is unjust. We found the remedy in the much-abused institution of domestic slavery. It simply ended this natural, this universal strife between capital and labour, by making 306 labour the property of capital, and thus investing it with an unfailing claim upon its fair share in the joint products of the two. The manner in which slavery effects this is plain. Where labour is free, competition reduces its price to whatever grade the laws of trade may fix; for labour is then a mere commodity in the market, unprotected, and subject to all the laws of demand and supply. The owner of land or capital pays for the labour he needs, in the shape of wages, just the price fixed by the relation of supply and demand; and if that price implies the severest privation for the labourer or his family, it is no concern of his. Should they perish by the inadequacy of the remuneration, it is not his loss: he has but to hire others from the anxious and competing multitude. Moreover, the ties of compassion and charity are vastly weaker than under our system; for that suffering labourer and his family are no more to that capitalist, than any other among the sons of want. But when we make the labour the property of the same persons to whom the land and capital belong, self-interest inevitably impels them to share with the labourer liberally enough to preserve his life and efficiency, because the labour is also, in the language of Moses, "their money," and if it suffers, they are the losers. By this arrangement also, a special tie and bond of sympathy are established between the capitalist and his labourers. They are members of his family. They not only work, but live, on his premises. A disregard of their wants and destitution is ten-fold more glaring, more difficult to perpetrate, and more promptly avenged by his own conscience and public opinion. The bond of domestic 307 affection ensures to the labourer a comfortable share of the fruits of that capital which his labour fecundates. And the law is enabled to make the employer directly responsible for the welfare of the employed. Thus, by this simple and potent expedient, slavery solved the difficulty, and answered the question raised by the gloomy speculations of Malthus, at whom all anti-slavery philosophers have only been able to rail, while equally impotent to overthrow his premises, or to arrest the evils he predicts.

Slavery also presented us with a simple and perfectly efficient preventive of pauperism. The law, public opinion, and natural affection, all joined in compelling each master to support his own sick and superannuated. And the elevation of the free white labourers, which results from slavery, by placing another labouring class below them, by assigning to them higher and more remunerative kinds of labour, and by diffusing a more general prosperity, reduced white pauperism to the smallest possible amount amongst us. In a Virginian slaveholding county, the financial burden of white pauperism was almost inappreciable. Thus, at one touch, our system solved happily, mercifully, justly, the Gordian knot of pauperism, a subject which has completely baffled British wisdom.

The attempt may be made to evade these considerations, by saying that the same law of increase in population will at length operate, in spite of slavery; and that its depressing effects will reveal themselves in this form: that the labouring class will become so numerous, the same alteration between demand and supply of labour will appear, and the slave's labour will 308 be worth no more than his maintenance, when he will cease to sell for any thing. At this stage, it may be urged, self-interest will surely prompt emancipation, and the whole slave system will fall before the evil which it was expected to counteract.

To this there are several answers. The argument implies that the slaves will be, at that stage, relatively very numerous. Then, the political difficulties of emancipation would be proportionably great. The political necessity would overrule the economical tendency, and compel the continuance of the beneficent institution. And while it subsisted, the tie of domestic affection, and the force of law and public opinion, would still secure for slaves a better share in the joint profits of labour and capital, than would be granted to depressed free labour. This was the case in the Roman Empire, where the population of Italy and Sicily was for several centuries as dense as in those modern States where the Malthusian law has worked most deplorably: and yet slavery did not yield, and emancipation did not follow.

But the more complete answer is as follows. We will attempt now to point out an influence which enabled domestic slavery to resist and repair the evils of over-population, vastly better than any other form of labour. As population increases, the size of fortunes which are accumulated increases. Instances of accumulation are more numerous and far more excessive. Density of population, facility of large industrial operations, concentration of number of labourers, with other causes, ensure that rich men will be vastly richer than while population was sparse; and that there will be 309 many more rich men. While a few of these will be misers, as a general rule they will seek to expend their overflowing incomes. But as man's real wants lie within very narrow limits, and the actual necessaries and comforts of life are cheap, the larger part of these overgrown incomes must be spent in superfluities. The money of the many excessively rich men is profusely spent in expensive jewelry, clothing, equipage, ostentatious architecture, useless menials, fine arts, and a thousand similar luxuries. Now the production of all these superfluities absorbs a vast amount of the national labour, and thus diminishes greatly the production of those values which satisfy real wants. A multitude of the labourers are seduced from the production of those more essential values, by the higher prices which luxury and pride are enabled to pay for their objects. Now, although the manufacturers of these superfluities may, individually, secure a better livelihood than those laborers who produce the necessaries of life, yet the result of the withdrawal of so many producing hands is, that the total amount of necessaries produced in the nation is much smaller. There is, then, a less mass of the necessaries of life to divide among the whole number of the citizens; and some people must draw a smaller share from the common stock. Every sensible man knows that these will be the landless, labouring men. The wealth of the rich will, of course, enable them to engross a liberal supply for their own wants, however scant may be that left for the poor. The ability to expend in superfluities is, therefore, a misdirection of just so much of the productive labour of the country, from the creation of 310 essential values, to the producing of that which fills no hungry stomach, clothes no naked back, and relieves no actual, bodily want. And here, after all, is the chief cause why the Malthusian law is found a true and efficient one in civilized communities. For, were the increasing labour of a growing nation wisely and beneficiently directed to draw from the soil and from nature all that they can be made to yield, their fecundity would be found to be practically so unlimited, that the means of existence would keep pace with the increase of population, to almost any extent. The operative cause of the growing depression of the poor is, not that the same acres are compelled to feed more mouths, and clothe more backs, so much as this: that the inducements which excessive wealth gives to the production of superfluities, misdirects so much precious labour, that the fruitfulness of those acres is not made to increase with the increase of mouths. This is proved by the simple fact, that in all the old countries the misery of the lowest classes tends to keep pace with the luxury of the highest. It is proved emphatically by the industrial condition of Great Britain. There is no country in which production is so active; none in which agriculture and the arts are more stimulated by science and intelligence; and yet there is a growing mass of destitution, yearly approaching more frightful dimensions, and testing the endurance of human nature by lower grades of physical discomfort. The reason is not to be sought in her limited territory or crowded population; for if the British Islands have not acres enough to grow their own bread for so many, why is it that so productive a people are not able to 311 pay for abundance of imported bread? It is to be found in the existence of their vast incomes, and the excessive luxury practised by the numerous rich. True, these magnates excuse their vast expenditures in superfluities by the plea, that one of the motives is the "encouragement of industry." But they effect, as we have seen, not an encouragement, but a misdirection of industry. The reason why so many British poor have a scanty share of physical comforts is, that there are so many British rich men who, by their lavish expenditure, tempt and seduce so large a multitude of producing hands from the creation of actual comforts to the creation of superfluities.

What safe remedy can the legislator propose for this evil? Not a violent, agrarian leveling of the larger estates. That, as we have shown, would be wicked and foolish. Nor can it be found in sumptuary laws. The world has tried them to its heart's content, and found them impracticable. It is true, that their adoption showed how clear a perception the ancients had of one truth, which modern political science pretends to ignore. That truth is, that luxury is a social evil. We have shown that it is as wasteful of social wealth as it is of morals. The ancients thought thus, and they were right. Legislators now-a-days, in exploding their remedy as no remedy, seem to desire to cheat themselves into the belief that the disease is no disease. But the ancients were not as stupid as men imagine.

Now, we do not boast that we can offer a perfect remedy. But our system of labour certainly gave us a partial one of inestimable value. Where the rich man is a citizen of a hireling State, his accumulated wealth 312 and profuse income are all spent in superfluities, except the small portion needed for the comforts of life for his own family. But when he is a citizen of a slave State, they are first taxed with the comfortable support of his slaves. The law, public opinion, affection for them, and self-interest, all compel him to make the first appropriation out of that profuse income, to feeding and clothing his slaves, before he proceeds to superfluities. Thus, the proceeds of the accumulations which dense population and social prosperity cause, are rescued from a useless and mischievous expenditure in those luxuries, the purchase of which misdirects public industry, and tempts to a deficient production of the necessaries of life; and are directed where benevolence, mercy, and the public good indicate, to the comfortable maintenance of the labouring people. That this is the effect of domestic slavery on the incomes of the rich, is proved by one familiar fact. It is well known at the South how slaveholders usually murmured when comparing their style of living with that of capitalists in the hireling States of equal nominal wealth. The planter who owned fifty thousand dollars worth of fertile lands, and a hundred slaves, while he lived in far more substantial comfort and plenty, displayed in Virginia far less ostentation and luxury than the merchant or manufacturer of the North who owns the same amount of capital. His house was plainly furnished with the old-fashioned goods of his fathers; his family rode in a plain carriage, drawn by a pair of stout nags which, probably, either did a fair share of ploughing also, or drew a large part of the fuel for the household. He himself was dressed partly in "jeans," woven under 313 the superintendence of his wife; and his boys were at school in a log house, with homespun clothing, and, in summer, bare feet. It was not unusual to hear the slaveholder, when he considered this contrast, complain of slavery as a bad institution for the master. But this was its merciful feature, that it in some measure arrested superfluous luxury, and taxed superfluous income with the more comfortable support of the labourers. In a hireling State, these might be left half-starved on the inadequate compensation which the hard law of supply and demand in the labour-market would compel them to accept, while the capitalist was rioting in a mischievous waste of the overgrown profits of his capital.

The question of the productiveness of slave labour may be anticipated, so far as to point out the fact, that this benevolent diversion of the large incomes from luxurious expenditures to the comfortable maintenance of the slaves, was a diversion from unproductive to productive consumption. The slaves were a productive class; and the increased comfort of their living added greatly to their increase, and their ability to labour. No student of political economy need be told how powerfully national wealth is promoted by any cause which substitutes productive consumption for unproductive.

The truth of these views is confirmed by this fact, which is attested by all experienced slaveholders: that the slaves throughout the South lived in far more comfort than they did a generation ago. And this is truest of those Southern communities where population is densest, and the price and rents of land are highest. As these influences, elsewhere so depressing to the poor, advanced, the standard of comfort for our slaves 314 rose rapidly, instead of falling. How can a more splendid vindication of the benevolence of our system be imagined? Our slaves generally ate more meat, wore more and better clothing, and lived in better houses, than their fathers did.

That a palpable view may be given, to those who are not personally acquainted with our system, of its true working, the reader's indulgence will be asked for the statement of a few homely details. In Virginia, all slaves, without exception, had their own private funds, derived from their poultry, gardens, "patches," or the prosecution of some mechanic art, in what is termed "their own time." These funds they expended as they pleased, in Sunday-clothing, or in such additions to their diet and comfort as they liked. The allowances which we proceed to state, are strictly those which the master usually made out of his funds. The allowances fixed by usage in this State were generally these: for clothing of adults, one complete suit of stout woolens, two pair pantaloons of cotton or flax, two shirts, two pair of worsted half-hose, and a hat and a blanket, each year. For shoes, the old rule was, one pair each winter, of the quality of best army shoes or boots, to be replaced at harvest with new ones, in the case of ploughmen and reapers, while the "less able-bodied hands" only got their old shoes repaired. But in latter years, the prevalent custom had come to be, to issue shoes to all adults, as often as is required, to keep them shod throughout the year; while the children were universally shod during the winter only.

For diet, the slaves shared jointly the garden-stuff, fruits and milk of the master's plantation and garden. 315 But their essential and preferred food was a certain daily or weekly allowance of corn meal and bacon, issued in addition to the above. The common rule in Virginia, where these were given in the form of rations, was to allow each adult a half-pound of bacon, and two quarts of meal per day. The meal of Indian corn, when uninjured by the mustiness of a sea-voyage, and properly baked at a bright wood-fire, is an excellent and nutritious food, as is shown by the fact that it fills more than an equal place with bread of wheat, on the tables of the richest planters. In many other families, the allowance of meal was unlimited; and the bacon was not issued in formal rations, the servants living at a common board. The supply laid in was then usually according to the following rule: one hundred and fifty pounds of pork per year, for every soul, white and black. When it is remembered that the sucklings and the white females used almost none of this supply, a simple calculation will show that it is equivalent to at least a half-pound per day for each adult. Such were the customary usages in Virginia. There were probably as many cases where the above rules were exceeded, as where the allowances fell below them. In the new States of the South West, where agriculture is still more profitable, it is said that the allowances were more liberal than in the old slave States.

It happens that the census returns of the United States for 1860, published by our enemies themselves, more than confirm this view of the abundant and comfortable living of our labouring population. According to those returns the free States had in 1860, not quite nineteen millions of people, and the slave States twelve 316 and a quarter millions. Of the cereals used by Americans for human food, the free States raised five hundred and sixty-one millions bushels; and the slave States four hundred and ninety-four millions bushels. That is, while the people of the free States had about thirty bushels each of these cereals, those of the slave States had forty-one bushels per head. Moreover, the North boasts that breadstuffs are her great export crops, while cotton and tobacco were ours. Our people, including our slaves, must therefore have used more than four bushels each, to their three. In neither country does each person eat either thirty or forty-one bushels per year; because horses and other live stock eat a part, which it is impossible accurately to estimate. Again: of the animals used for human food, (horned cattle, sheep, and swine,) then free States had about forty millions, or a little more than two per head to each inhabitant; while the slave States had forty and a half millions, or about three and a half to each inhabitant. But as bacon or pork is the flesh most commonly consumed by Americans, and especially by farm labourers, the proportion of swine is still more significant. The free States had not quite twelve millions of swine, and the slave States twenty millions six hundred thousand. This gives a little more than six-tenths of one swine to each inhabitant of the North, and one and seven-tenths to each inhabitant of the South. But this is not all,—for the North (especially the prairie States) exported vast quantities of the flesh of swine to the South, while the slave States exported none to the North. It should in justice be said, that the disparity is not so enormous as would thus appear, because the swine reared 317 in the South are usually smaller than those of the North.
§ 3. Comparative productiveness of Slave Labour.

From the days of Adam Smith, anti-slavery men have been pleased to consider it as a point perfectly settled, that slave labour is comparatively unfavourable to production, and thus, to publick wealth. So settled is this conviction among the enemies, and so often has it been admitted by the apologists of our system, it will probably be hard to secure even a hearing, while we review the grounds on which the common opinion is based. One would think that the fact that those grounds have usually been urged by men who, like Adam Smith, knew nothing of slavery themselves, should bespeak for us at least a little patience and candour.

One of those grounds is, that slavery, by making manual labour the peculiar lot of a servile class, renders it disreputable. This, they suppose, together with the exemption from the law of necessity, fosters indolence in the masters. But, we reply, is manual labour the peculiar lot of the servile class alone, in slave States? Is not this the very question to be settled? Yet it is assumed as the premise from which to settle it. So that the reasoning amounts to no more than this ridiculous petitio principii: "Because the slaves do all the work, therefore the masters do none of the work." This should be made a question of fact. And we emphatically deny that Southern masters were an indolent class, as compared with the moneyed classes elsewhere. In fact, the general rule is that rich men do not work, the world over. It was less true, probably, 318 in Virginia, than in any other commonwealth. The wealthy man of the North, with his grown sons, is more indolent, and more a fine gentleman, than the wealthy slaveholder. If it be said that, in free States, a multitude of small farmers cultivate their lands with their own hands, it is equally true that a multitude of small planters in the South, who owned one, three or five slaves, laboured along with them. That the land shall be owned by the very persons who cultivate it, is an exceptional condition of things, resulting, to some extent in New England, from a very peculiar history, origin and condition of society, and not destined to continue general even there. It is as true of hireling as of slave States, that the tendency of civilized institutions is, and ever has been, and ever will be, generally, to collect the lands in larger properties, in the hands of a richer class than that which actually tills them. Nor is there one syllable of truth in the idea, that labour was among us more disreputable, because usually done by slaves. In all countries, there is foolish pride, and importance is attached, by the silly, to empty badges of station. But it was less so among slaveholders than among the rich, or the would-be rich, of other countries. The reason is obvious. In free States there is just as truly a servile class, bearing the servile inferiority of social station, as among us. That class being white, and nominally free, its addiction to manual labour is the only badge of its social condition. Hence whites of the superior class have a far stronger motive, in their pride, to shun labour. But the white master could freely labour among his black servants, without danger of being mistaken by the transient observer 319 for one of the class, because his skin distinguished him: just as the man of unquestioned wealth and fashion can wear a plain coat, which would be shunned as the plague, by the doubtful aspirant to ton. We repeat: the planters of Virginia were more often seen performing, not only the labours of superintendence, but actual manual labour, than any wealthy class in America. They were proverbial for perseverance and energy. There is a fact which bears a peculiar testimony to this. While Yankee adventurers and immigrants have intruded themselves into every other calling among us, like the frogs into the Egyptian houses and their very chambers and kneading-troughs, those of them who have attempted to act the tobacco planter have, in almost every case, failed utterly. They lack the requisite energy for the calling.

Another reason of the anti-slavery man is, that the free labourer, stimulated by personal interest in his own success, must be more thrifty, industrious, and economical than the slave, who is stimulated only by fear. We reply: both the premises are absolutely false. Slaves were not stimulated only by fear. They felt at least as much affection as the Red Republican or Chartist hireling. They comprehended their own interest in their master's prosperity as fully as hired labourers do. But, in the second place, the labour of free States is not usually performed by men who have a personal interest in their own success: it is performed, in the main, by a landless class, who are as very hirelings as our slaves were slaves; who need just as much the eye of an overseer, and who must be pricked on in their labour, at least as often, by the threat, not of the birch, 320 but of the more cruel penalty of discharge; which they know is their dismissal to starvation or the work-house. This delusive reasoning proceeds by comparing the yeoman landholder in fee-simple, tilling his own soil with his own hands, with the slave tilling the land of his wealthy master. But are the lands of hireling States prevalently tilled by their yeomen owners? Is this the system to which free society tends? The Englishman will not dare to say so, when he looks around him, and sees how rapidly the small holdings have been swallowed up into larger farms, which are now worked by capitalists with organized gangs of hirelings; nor the Scotchman, with the sight of an old tenant peasantry swept away before the ruthless Bothy-system of his country. And, as we have asserted, the class of yeomen landholders, labouring personally among their few slaves, was at least as large, and as permanent in the South, as in any civilized country.

Here again, the actual experiment of abolition has ridiculously exploded all these baseless reasonings for the superior zeal of the white free labourer, and the thriftless eye-service of the slave. All intelligent men knew before that they were precisely contrary to fact; for they saw all hireling labour at the North obviously required a supervision much more constant and stringent, to prevent the hirelings from bringing the employers to bankruptcy by their worthless eye-service, than the labour of our own merry and affectionate servants. If the white hireling labour was aggregated in masses, we uniformly saw it distributed in gangs, to sturdy "bosses," who stood with their formidable bludgeons in their hands, from morning to night, with 321 just fourfold the persistency of any Southern "head-man" or "overseer," and actually indicted blows on his free white fellow-citizens, as frequently as our overseers on the servant children. If the white hireling labour was employed on their little farms, in small numbers, then the proprietors always informed us, that they must be present in the field all the time, to shame and encourage them by their example, or else their "help" would cheat them to their ruin. But in the South, nothing was more common than to see estates farmed by the faithful slaves, for widows, orphans, professional men, or non-resident proprietors, without any other superintendence than an occasional visit. Now, all this is at an end. The labourers are free hirelings, who, according to the anti-slavery argument, should be so superior in enlightened zeal and fidelity. But lo, the Southern people have found that eye-service has thereby increased ten-fold; and if there is any lesson which the South has effectually learned in these two years, it is, that perpetual and jealous supervision is the sole condition on which a meagre profit can be extracted from this wretched and grinding system; and that else, the impositions of the hired labourers inevitably result in speedy bankruptcy. Hard fact has demonstrated that the truth is prec............