Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/53

Rh through the whole Continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery. The moment you leave the Eastern States and enter New York, the effects of the institution ^become visible. Passing through the Jerseys and entering Pennsylvania, every criterion of superior improvement witnesses the change. Proceed southwardly, and every step you take through the great regions of slaves, presents a desert increasing with the increasing proportion of these wretched beings. "At this day, sixty years later, the contrast is yet more striking, as will presently appear.

Slavery has wrought after its way. Every tree bears its own fruit. Slavery discourages the immigration of able but poor men from the free States. They go elsewhere to sell their labour; all the Southern States afford proof of this. The freeman from the North will not put himself and his intelligent industry on a level with the slave, degraded and despised. In the free States the farmer buys his land and his cattle; hires men to aid him in his work—he buys their labour. Both parties are served—this with labour, that with employment. There is no degradation, but reciprocal gain; In a few years the men who at first sold their labour will themselves become proprietors, and hire others desirous of selling their services. It requires little capital to start with. So the number of proprietors rapidly increases, and the amount of cultivated land, of wealth, of population, of comfort. In the South the proprietor must also buy his workmen; the poor man who seeks a market for his work, not his person, must apply elsewhere.

This cause has long impeded the agriculture of the South; it will also hinder the advance of manufactures. At Lowell the manufacturer builds his mill, buys his cotton, and reserves a sufficient sum for his "floating capital;" he hires five hundred men and women to work his machinery, paying them from week to week for the labour he has bought. In South Carolina he must buy his operatives also; five hundred slaves at $600 each, amount to $300,000. This additional sum is needed before a wheel can turn. To start, it requires large capital ; but capital is what is not so easily obtained in a slave State, where there is no natural stimulus urging the labouring mass to