Page:Cheap cotton by free labor.djvu/8

 exhaustive that it is admitted it could not be continued in Cuba without a constant fresh supply of slave labor from Africa.

Is it to be wondered at, that after freedom has been attained, a product requiring such labor should partially cease to be cultivated?

On the other hand, cotton is of easy culture; the whole machinery required for a large plantation, besides the ordinary agricultural implements, being a cotton gin costing about $250, and a press costing about the same. In the picking season, a few extra hands, women or children, are required during the ordinary working hours. In the present argument, we may admit that we must have cotton, and that the emancipated slave will be idle and utterly worthless;—we may leave out of sight the fact that even in our southern climate, labor or starvation would be his only choice, and that labor upon the cotton field would be the easiest and most profitable in which he could engage;—let him starve and exterminate himself if he will, and so remove the negro question,still we must raise cotton; who will cultivate it?* were upon them. Let us try these other possessions by the test of sugar exports : — AVERAGE ANNUAL EXPORT OF SUGAR. 1826 a 1829, slave. 1856 a 1860, free. British Guiana, 98,000,000 lbs. 100,600,000 lbs. Trinidad, 37,000,000 " 62,000,000 " Barbadoes, 32,800,000 " 78,000,000 " Antigua, 19,500,000 " 24,400,000 " 187,300,000 " 265,000,000 " Annual imports, same colonies, $8,840,000 $14,600,000 Balance of export and import trade in favor of freedom, at least $15,000,000 annually. process of disposing of the negro question, and desires the fact to be pointed out, that in Boston and New York the proportion of colored paupers and criminals to the colored population is only about one half that of the whites ; thereby, he
 * A friend, who has kindly corrected the proofs, protests against this summary