adaptation. The "business" blocks of the city, where granite highways are lined with marble palaces and temples, are not allowed by the statistician to detract from the peculiar honors due to the suburbs, where art is less a consideration of actual value and nature enters more into the estimate. The greater population, occupying smaller area, in the free States gave higher market value to the soil in the free States; the productive occupation of all slaves of both sexes, of proper age, contributed to the advantage the laborer of the slave States maintained over the laborer of the free States.

The brief account of industrial conditions prevailing in the warring sections, of 1860, will be closed with the following summary of wealth in Agriculture, Manufactures and Com

The per capita of wealth in the free States, in the specified items, is shown at $372, and in the slave States, enumerating whites only, at $682.*

In estimating the imperfection of any social polity, the truth it contains within itself can only be appreciated by considering the concrete and comparing and contrasting it with others. The slave States having lost nothing, on the material or industrial score, where the free States were brought into view, it becomes important to pursue the parallelism involved into the sphere of morals. The relative illiteracy of the sections was markedly against the slave States; the relative pauperism and crime of the free States far exceeded the count under those heads in the slave States. It should not be forgotten that illiteracy in the slave States did not disqualify the

* California and Oregon are omitted from the items of land values and railroads. The sailing vessel tonnage is estimated at $25 the ton and the steamship tonnage at $70 the ton. Comp. Eighth Census and Commerce and Navigation, United States Government Print, i890, are authorities used.

individual from the successful prosecution of the main industry of the section. Nor did the fact of illiteracy operate to deprive the individual white man of the respect and confidence inspired in the minds of educated people by his general character for probity and industry. The illiterate white man had an equal opportunity to hear public oratory and to attend public assemblies, and the social recognition allowed to him on all sides by all classes encouraged a manly appropriation of the advantages to be derived from it. In so far as illiteracy in the African affected Southern society, it may be safely declared that the average mental acumen and moral perception of the race far exceeded, in 1860, the status attained to in 1890, after twenty-five years of devoted experimentation in its scholastic training.

There was abundant evidence of the revival of interest in public schools in the slave States, in 1860. The University and College had preceded the public school system in New England, as in the South. There was evidence, that in this particular, the slave States were following the experience of England in working reform from the top downward, through the organization of society. Indeed, the public educational system of Alabama, which received special attention from the Legislature, in the early years of the decade of 1850-1860, was advanced to a position quite equal to that of Indiana, a free agricultural State, at the same period.

The moral condition of the slave States lost nothing in comparison with the free. Churches were more numerous in the former than in the latter, and church membership in proportion to population was more numerous.*

* I am indebted to Rev. Basil Manly, D. D., of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, for the compilation of educational statistics, verified by Vol. IV, p. 50 Introduction, and pp. 502-506 Census 1860.

CHAPTER 21.

The Argument Continued.

1860.

A modern philosopher - Herbert Spencer-insists that whenever natural causes are discovered to be powerful, a widespread accusation springs up against them that they are powerless; and that in proportion as an evil decreases popular denunciation of it increases. A remarkable justification of these general conclusions appears in the metamorphosis which spread itself over the Northern mind when it had become apparent that the laws of nature were rapidly preparing slavery, in the South, for self-extinction. In the last Chapter it was shown that the problem of Southern society, if undisturbed by the revolutionary acts of the Abolitionists, would be to adjust the profits of slave labor, the income derived from plantations, to the spirit of development abroad in the land. Local competitive economic forces were inevitable. The competition with slavery, thus arising, had been fatal to the institution throughout its history, coming down the ages. "Do not ask (says a writer in the early Christian epoch) how these Old Testament precepts can be good now, when the need for them is past; ask how they were good when the period required them. Or, if you wish, do inquire into their merit even now. It is still conspicuous, and lies in nothing so much as what now enables us to find fault with them. Their highest praise is that we now see them to be defective."

By the census of 1840 the free States gained in representation in the Lower House of Congress, so that their majority was fifty-one. Their majority in the decade next following was fifty-four. The federal taxes and disbursements of revenues were controlled by this majority, to the great injury of Southern industrial life, in respect to the natural laws affecting the relations of the African. An equitable disbursement of taxes collected under a just system would have left, in the slave States, vast accumulations of money derived from sales of plantation crops. Slave property being limited to natural increase, investment of ready cash must have sought enterprises not dependent on slave labor, however useful might have been free African labor. It has been shown that the cotton crop of 1859, increased, over that of 1849, more than one hundred per cent., on a rising market; that Southern bank deposits multiplied, but the increase of slaves, in the same time, was less than 24 per cent. Moreover, the price of slaves doubled. The basis of a reformed economy was, the ready money awaiting investment. No investment of a profitable nature was possible, which would not have become competitive with property in labor. Year following year, the fiscal action of the federal government militated against the normal action of Southern society, and so prepared the sword to work out the extinction of slavery; for which end active economic influences, within the slave States, were preparing with justice and peace. The measure recommended by Mr. Adams, that Congress should make a treaty with each slave State, for emancipation of its slaves, and the various "compromises" enacted by Congress, hostile to the institution of slavery, were in direct conflict with the theory of Constitutional growth, founded on the evolutionary elements of the society affected. They involved the application of power, resident in a central government, ignoring the reformatory instinct of society to adjust its inherent forces to the end of social progress. Throughout nearly half a century of acrimonious agitation, the Abolitionists brought forward no temperate, practical or humane measure to assist the African of the South along that line of mental and moral development upon which the methods of the plantation and the statutes and Constitutions of the slave States propelled him. The

anti-slavery sentimentalism of New England was fomented in old England, and was complicated with English financial policies and commercial interests - the same which demanded the breaking up of the English colonies in the West Indies to transfer English supremacy to the East Indies. The alliance, with old England, of the Abolitionists extended to the obstructing, up to the full measure of their opportunity, of the designs of their own government to the southward; refusing their sanction to a commercial highway connecting the Pacific and Atlantic, across the isthmus of Central America; secretly approving the murder of Crittenden, in Cuba; openly applauding the downfall of General William Walker; denouncing Commodore Ingraham, the Southerner, for the honorable service he rendered his flag in the seas of Eastern Europe. So, too, it appeared that when every vote in the Lower House of Congress, from Massachusetts, joined South Carolina in support of the tariff bill, of 1857, Massachusetts was recompensed in the augmented sympathies which bound together Exeter Hall and the school of Garrison.

The infidelity of the Abolitionists to a just or humane statesmanship, looking to the solution of the question of slavery, was made evident in their bold and persistent renouncement of the following propositions, held out in the actual conditions of Southern society:

1. The involvement of the slave in a self-adjusting economy calculated to elevate him from the ancient status of bondage to the modern status of contract,

2. The involvement of the slave in the political doctrine of the sacredness of Constitutional obligations.

Both of these propositions were avoided by the Abolitionists. The sublimated theory of the rights of the minority in the federal compact was forced to yield to the profane power of the majority. The destiny of the African, of the Southern plantation, was turned from its course. The glory of the American idea was denied its opportunity. The process of African transition, through the perfected agency of bondage, was disastrously convulsed.

There cannot be said to have been any general appreciation on the part of the Southern people of the practical conflict between accumulating profits of the plantations and the security