With
this decrease of export the _import of food has decreased, although the
population, has increased_; but, at the present day, the aggregate value
of the exports of _all_ the British West Indies is now nearly as great
as it was in the palmiest days of slavery, while on an average the free
blacks now earn far more for themselves than they formerly did for their
masters, and are therefore 'better off.' Even those who regard the
negro, whether a slave or free, as fulfilling his whole earthly mission
in proportion to the profit which he yields Lancashire spinners, have no
just grounds of complaint. But as regards the United States, there are
certain facts to be considered. According to the census of 1850, there
were in our slave States, 'where it is frequently asserted that white
men can not labor in the fields,' eight hundred thousand free whites
over fifteen years of age employed exclusively in agriculture, and over
one million exclusively in out-door labor. Again, wherever the
free-white labor and small-farm system of growing cotton has been tried,
it has invariably proved more productive than that of employing slaves.
It can not be denied that, deducting the expense of maintaining decrepit
and infant slaves, every field hand costs $20 per month, and German
labor could be hired for less than this, the success of such labor in
Texas fully establishing its superiority,--and Texas contains cotton and
sugar land enough to supply three times the entire crop now raised in
this country.
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