who become poorer from year to year. All this, we are told, is a consequence of the fact, that "slavery is not adapted to the operations of scientific agriculture;" but here, as usual, modern political economy substitutes effect for cause-the continued existence of slavery being a result of the absence of that combination which is necessary to the advancement of agriculture. Men become free as they are enabled to diversify their employments, to associate and combine, and thus to obtain power over nature-compelling her to labor in their service. With every step in that direction, the land becomes enriched, and THE MAN appears-taking the place of the mere brute beast who before had scratched the land. Freedom came to England along with manufactures; and in every country of the world men have become free in the precise ratio in which they have been enabled to substitute the great natural powers for mere muscular force. 5. With the growth of commerce, and the increase in the power of association, the farmer is enabled to vary the objects of cultivation substituting potatoes, turnips, and other products, of which the earth yields by tons, for wheat, of which it yields by bushels, and for cotton, the yield of which is pounds. With the decline of commerce and growth of the power of trade, the market becomes more distant, and he is compelled to limit himself to the few commodities of which the earth yields but little, and that will, therefore, bear transportation. Each and every plant requires for its nourishment certain elements, by the continual extraction of which the earth is impoverished; and thus do the exhaustion of the land, and the dispersion of men, in one year, prepare for further exhaustion and dispersion in another one. Such having been the case with cotton and sugar cultivation in the Southern States, and that of wheat and tobacco in the more Northern ones, the consequences are seen in the fact, that the impoverishment of the soil and the dispersion of population proceed from year to year at a constantly accelerated pace. The more rapid the dispersion, the smaller is the quantity of commodities returned to the labor bestowed upon the land, the larger the proportion thereof absorbed by the trader and transporter, and the greater the tendency towards centralization and slavery. The people of India, as we have seen, do not obtain more than $1,200,000 for their whole cotton crop, but when it is returned to them in the form of cloth, it costs them more than $30,000,000 all the difference going to the people engaged in changing its place and form, and in making the exchanges. Hence it is that so many of them are found selling themselves to slavery in the Mauritius. The Irishman parts with raw material at the lowest prices, and buys it back at the highest ones; and hence it is that those who escape famine and pestilence so gladly abandon their native land. The people of Texas obtain cents for their cot. ton, and pay dollars for the cloth, the iron, and the implements they require all the difference going to the men who own horses and wagons, ships and steamboats, and the thousand other middlemen who stand between those who produce and those who consume. * Hence the barbarism of all the Southern implements of husbandry, and the growing love of slavery.† § 6. The more perfect the power of association and combination, the more rapid is the progress of agricultural knowledge, the larger is the quantity of commodities obtained from the earth, and the smaller is the proportion required for paying the tax of transportation and exchange-and the larger is the power of the planter and farmer to determine for themselves the application of their labor and their land. The less that power, the more does agriculture cease to be a science, the smaller is the quantity of things obtained, the larger is the proportion required by the trader and transporter, and the more rapidly does the cultivator sink to the condition of a mere slave, to be controlled in all his operations by those who stand between himself and the consumer of his pro We have been without coffee, sugar, tea, or flour for the past six months. We have had no potatoes for two years, and no sweet potatoes this year. We have had no pea crop the past season, not being able to get seed. In fact, we have been literally starving almost in sight of abundance. My bagging and rope cost me last year 23 and 14 cents, and my cotton, owing to the high rate of transportation, only netted me 5 cents. This represents the actual state of things in my section, and within a few miles of two important rivers." "What avail good lands and rich crops, without markets in which to buy and sell?" Letter from Texas, in a New Orleans Journal. * "The nigger hoe' was first introduced into Virginia as a substitute for the plough, in breaking up the soil. The law fixes its weight at four pounds -as heavy as the woodman's axe! It is still used, not only in Virginia, but in Georgia and the Carolinas. The planters tell us, as the reason for its use, that the negroes would break a Yankee hoe in pieces upon the first root or stone that might be in their way."-Correspondence of the New York Tribune. ducts. The men of India and of Ireland, of Turkey and of Portugal, of Jamaica and of Brazil - though claiming to be freehave no power to determine how they will employ their land or their labor. The price of all their commodities is fixed in the great central market, filled, as it is, by men who desire that corn and flax, sugar and coffee, cotton and indigo, may be cheap, and cloth and iron dear. They are thus kept so poor as to be unable to help themselves, and to be forced to rely upon advances made to them by the trader, who exacts, of course, a lion's share of the product of their efforts; and the larger his share, the greater is his power to compel them to remain dependent upon his favor. Occasionally, he lends them a part of the capital thus extorted, for the purpose of making roads and further facilitating the exhaustion of their land; but the more roads they make, the greater is the tendency to further dispersion and further loss of power. The railroads of Ireland were preliminary to the famines, pestilences, and dispersions that since have taken place; while those of India are but the preparation for further and more complete exhaustion of its soil and diminution of its population. So is it here. The more roads that are made, the more rapid is the dispersion of the people the less is their power of combination - the smaller are the prices they obtain at market — the more rapid is the growth of the central cities and the more entire is the dependence of the country upon those cities for advances upon the growing crops, or for aid in the construction of roads; but the more splendid are the palaces erected by "the merchant princes," whose fortunes increase most rapidly when the farmer is forced to accept the smallest price for his flour-when the planter obtains least for his cotton-and when the land is being most rapidly exhausted. The objects of the trader are directly the reverse of those desired by the men who labor to produce, and who must consume. He wishes that corn may be cheap and flour dear, that cotton may be low and cloth high; and the more wide the separation, the larger is the proportion of the commodities by him retained. His power grows with dispersion of the people and diminution in the power to maintain commerce; and such is the course of things in all the countries that follow in the lead of England, the United States included. § 7. The trader thrives by means of changes in the prices of the commodities in which he deals. He desires to buy cheaply and sell dearly; and the more frequent the vicissitudes of trade, the more numerous are his chances for accumulating fortune. The farmer and the planter, the miner and the smelter of iron, desire steadiness, for they must make all their arrangements for years ahead. The man who clears a piece of land, desiring to make of it a home for his wife and children, is engaged upon a work requiring much time for its execution, and he would wish that wheat or cotton should command as high a price when he might become ready to sell, as he found himself compelled to pay while engaged in making his food-producing machine, and obliged to purchase. The cotton-mill requires years for its construction, and other years for the collection and efficient organization of the people who are there to work. The mines, the furnace, and the rolling-mill require years of exertion, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenditure, before they begin to repay their owner. The trader, on the contrary, buys and sells from hour to hour, and the more he can cause changes in the value of wheat and flour, cloth and iron, the greater is the probability that he will be able to enter upon the possession of the land of the farmer, the mill of the cloth manufacturer, the furnace of the maker of railroad bars, or the road of the man who has invested his fortune in a great improvement and at half the cost at which this machinery has been constructed. Trade and commerce look, thus, always in opposite directions the one towards frequent and rapid changes of price, aad the other towards stability and regularity. - In the trade-ridden countries to which we have referred, instability grows from year to year, and this it does in virtue of a great law, which requires that stability shall decline in the precise ratio of the approximation of a body to the form of an inverted pyramid. In France, where commerce is acquiring power over trade, there is, as has been seen, a steady onward progress, accompanied by a stability that grows despite of frequent political revolutions. So is it in Prussia and in Denmark, in Russia and in Sweden; and so must it be in every country in which the circulation of society becomes more continuous, with constant increase of force. -Steady motion is requisite to the perpetuation of all machinery, |