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ern regions, is confirmed by experience. The southern parts of the Union are not hotter than the south of Italy and of Spain;[1] and it may be asked why the European cannot work as well there as in the two latter countries. If slavery has been abolished in Italy and in Spain without causing the destruction of the masters, why should not the same thing take place in the Union? I cannot believe that Nature has prohibited the Europeans in Georgia and the Floridas, under pain of death, from raising the means of subsistence from the soil; but their labour would unquestionably be more irksome and less productive[2] to them than to the inhabitants of New England. As the free workman thus loses a portion of his superiority over the slave in the southern states, there are fewer inducements to abolish slavery.
All the plants of Europe grow in the northern parts of the Union; the south has special productions of its own. It has been observed that slave labour is a very expensive method of cultivating corn. The farmer of corn-land in a country where slavery is unknown, habitually retains a small number of labourers in his service, and at seed-time and harvest he hires several additional hands, who only live at his cost for a short period. But the agriculturist in a slave state is obliged to keep a large number of slaves the whole year round, in order to sow his fields and to gather in his crops, although their services are only required for a few weeks; but slaves are unable to wait till they are hired, and to subsist by their own labour in the meantime like free labourers; in order to have their services, they must be bought. Slavery, independently of its general disadvantages, is therefore still more inapplicable to countries in which corn is cultivated than to those which produce crops of a different kind.
The cultivation of tobacco, of cotton, and especially of the sugar-cane, demands on the other hand, unremitting attention: and women and children are employed in it, whose services are of but little use in the cultivation of wheat. Thus slavery is naturally
- ↑ These states are nearer to the equator than Italy and Spain, but the temperature of the continent of America is very much lower than that of Europe.
- ↑ The Spanish government formerly caused a certain number of peasants from the Azores to be transported into a district of Louisiana called Attakapas, by way of experiment. These settlers still cultivate the soil without the assistance of slaves, but their industry is so languid as scarcely to supply their most necessary wants.
