the interests of both the artisan and the man who held the plough. Seeking for an emphatic denunciation of all the modern British doctrines in regard to land and labor, we must turn to the Wealth of Nations. a great work, whose essential errors have been carefully adopted by the Ricardo-Malthusian school, while rejecting all its truths. § 10. Passing, in the foregoing diagram, from left to right. circulation becomes more rapid—land becoming divided — and man becoming free as prices more and more approximate. Passing in the other direction, land becomes consolidated, and man becomes less free-prices more and more diverging from each other as the trader acquires power at the expense of both. The phenomena presented to view by the United States are those of this latter species- the tendency being towards consolidation of the land, extension of slavery, and decline of all their raw products, when compared with any of the metallic products of the earth. Why this is so, we may now inquire. The colonial system had for its object a stoppage of circulation among the colonists, with a view to compel the export of raw materials, and their importation in the form of cloth and iron. That such a policy tended towards the destruction of the value of both land and man, was well understood by Franklin, according to whom, it was, in 1771, "well known and understood that whenever a manufacture is established which employs a number of hands, it raises the value of lands in the neighboring country all around it, partly by the greater demand near at hand for the produce of the land, and partly from the plenty of money drawn. by the manufactures to that part of the country. It seems, therefore," as he continues, "the interest of all our farmers and owners of lands to encourage our young manufactures in preference to foreign ones imported among us from distant countries." Such was, then, the almost universal feeling of the country, and to this, far more than to the tax on tea, or the stamp act, the revolutionary movement was due. With the establishment of their independence, the necessity for submission to the system disappeared. The habit of submission continuing, however, its effects are felt in the fact, that, with slight exceptions, the policy of the country has been directed towards securing markets for raw products- a proceeding resulting necessarily in exhaustion of the land, dispersion of the population, and stoppage of societary circulation. In despite of this, certain descriptions of manufactures have, at the North, grown slowly up; but, in the Southern States, failure has attended almost every effort in that direction. The prohibitory laws having most effectually prevented the introduction. of any of the mechanic arts, those States exhibited, everywhere, a small population scattered over extensive surfaces, unable to combine their labors, and exhausting all their energies in the effort to reach a market. Virginia, the largest of them, contained 40,000,000 acres; and yet her population was only 600,000. The power to combine having no existence, coal could not be mined, nor could wool be spun or cloth be woven. The smaller the bulk of the commodities taken from the land, the less being the charge for transportation, the planter found himself limited to the most exhausting of all the crops-tobacco. He lived, in fact, by the sale of the soil itself, and not by the product of his labor. He and his land becoming impoverished together, he was compelled to transport himself and his people to more distant lands, with constant increase of the tax of transportation, and as constant decrease in the rapidity of circulation. Cultivation commencing always on the poorer soils, and the richer ones awaiting the growth of wealth and population, the latter remained untouched. Hence it is, that a distinguished Virginian is now enabled to assure his countrymen of the vast advantages that must result from such a change of system as would reduce to cultivation the richer soils, while restoring those which have been exhausted. Adopting the one he proposes, the advantages to South Virginia alone, will, as he says, amount to $500,000,000-giving "strength, physical, intellectual, and moral, as well as revenue to the commonwealth, which will," as he continues, "derive new and great increase from the growing improvements of that one, and the smallest, of the great divisions of her territory, which was the poorest by natural constitutionstill more the poorest by long-exhausting tillage-its best population gone or going away, and the remaining portion sinking into apathy and degradation, and having no hope left except that so almost universally entertained, of fleeing from the ruined country, and renewing the work of destruction on the fertile lands of the far West. "'* North Carolina is rich in lands, undrained and uncultivated, while coal and iron ore abound. Her area is greater than that of Ireland, and yet her population is but 868,000-having increased but 130,000 in twenty years. In South Carolina, the course of things has been precisely the same with that described in reference to Virginia; yet the State, says Governor Seabrook, has "millions of uncleared acres of unsurpassed fertility, which seem to solicit a trial of their powers from the people of the plantation States."***"In her borders," as he continues, "there is scarcely a vegetable product essential to the human race that cannot be furnished." Marl and lime abound, millions of acres of rich meadow-land remain in a state of nature, and "the sea-shore parishes," he adds, "possess unfailing supplies of salt mud, salt grass, and shell-lime." So great, nevertheless, has been the tendency to the abandonment of the land, that, in the decade from 1830 to 1840, the white population increased but 1000 and the black but 12,000; whereas the natural increase alone would have given at least 150,000. Allowing Virginia, at the close of the Revolution, 600,000 people, she should now have-excluding all allowance for immigration-4,000,000, or one to every ten acres; and no one at all familiar with the vast advantages of the State, can doubt her capability of supporting more than thrice that number.† Nevertheless, the total population, in 1850, was but 1,424,000-the increase in twenty years having been but 200,000; when it should have been 1,200,000. Seeking to know what has become of all these people, the reader may find them among the millions now inhabiting Alabama and Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. Desiring next to know why they are there, the answer to the question may be given in the words: "They borrowed from the earth, but they did not repay, and she expelled them." When men come together and combine their efforts, they are enabled to bring into activity all the vast and various powers of the earth the more they come together, the greater being the RUFFIN: Essay on Manures. The superficial area of the State is 64,000 square miles-being greater than that of England, and double that of Ireland. VOL. III.-7 value of land and the demand for labor-the higher their prices -and the greater the freedom of man. When, on the contrary, they fly apart, the greater is the tendency to a decline in the value of land, the less is the value of labor, and the less the freedom of man. Desiring, then, to ascertain the ultimate cause of the existence of the domestic slave-trade, it would seem to be necessary only to ascertain the causes of the exhaustion of the land. Seeking to discover these, we find in the works of British writers that "the mode of agriculture usually coincident with the employment of slave labor is essentially exhaustive"— slavery thus being given, as the cause of declining agriculture. As usual, however, cause and effect are here inverted-a declining agriculture being the cause of slavery extension. In proof of this, we need only look to Ireland, Turkey, Portugal, or any other country in which diversity of employments has not arisen, or in which it has ceased to exist, as a consequence of a system tending towards the separation of the consumer from the producer. In all such countries — the circulation being necessarily slow — it is as entirely impossible that there should be physical health, as it would be in a human body similarly situated. The more rapid the circulation, the higher will always be found the health of both. It is not slavery that produces exhaustion of the soil, but exhaustion of the soil that causes slavery to continue. The people of England rose from slavery to freedom as the land was made productive-larger numbers being thus enabled to obtain subsistence from similar surfaces; and it was precisely as land acquired value that they were freed. Such, too, has been the case with every people that has been enabled to pay its debts to mother earth, because of having a market near at hand. On the contrary, there is no country in the world, in which men have been deprived of the power to improve their land, in which slavery has not been maintained-becoming aggravated in intensity as the land became more and more exhausted. It is to this perpetual separation from each other that the poverty and weakuess of the Southern portion of the Union are due. At the close of the Revolution, the now slave States contained 1,600,000 people, scattered over 120,000,000 of acres -giving an average of about eighty acres to each. In 1850, their numbers had grown to 8,500,000, with an area of more than 1,000,000,000—giving to each more than one hundred acres. Circulation being, therefore, languid to a degree that is almost inconceivable, production is trivial in its amount, as is shown by an estimate for 1850, furnished by a Southern journal of undoubted reputation : Adding for food an equal amount.................. .................................................. We obtain.......... 138,691,990 22,616,020 .$300,000,000 as the total production of eight millions and a half of people, or $35 each. Taking, now, the total production of the Union at $3,600,000,000, we have for 14,500,000 of Northern people $3,000,000,000-being nearly seven times as much per head. In the one-all being limited to the work of exhausting the land, and all living by the sale of the soil- the circulation is slow, and labor is wasted. In the other the circulation being somelabor is, in some degree, economised. what more rapid The slower the circulation, the more is the tendency towards slavery; and hence it is, that slavery so much advances. That it may become otherwise, the planter must be compelled to pay his debts to the land; and that he cannot be, while obliged to resort to the distant market. Obvious as is this truth, distinguished Englishmen congratulate their countrymen on the working of the free-trade system, in destroying the domestic manufactures of Carolina and other Southern States, and thus compelling the export of cotton in its rudest state. But a few years since, Georgia promised to become a principal seat of the cotton manufacture for the world. Now, she exports her people so rapidly, that, with every natural advantage, her population has grown, in the last five years, but three per cent. Hence the existence of a domestic slave-trade that shocks the feelings of Christian men; and hence, too, the discord between the Northern and Southern portions of the Union. *De Bow's Review. |
