ITS EVIL INFLUENCE IN THE STATES, 365 



and the delicacy required to manage them. In the south 

 these difficulties vanish. Slave labour is easily obtained, 

 and the slave obeys as mechanically as the machine he 

 superintends. A great and rapid extension of the 

 factory system is therefore looked for in the south, and 

 many predict that the manufacturers of the eastern 

 States will sink before them. 



But whether the latter result follow or not, the pros 

 pect is anything but cheering to the friends of free 

 labour. If to the cotton-culture hitherto the great 

 slave-multiplier be added that of sugar, as a profitable 

 employment, and to both the use of slaves in cotton and 

 other factories, it cannot be doubted that a new and 

 great stimulus will be given to the breeding and traffic 

 in slaves, and a stronger attachment created towards 

 those domestic institutions by which slavery is established 

 and made legal. 



And if in free England the factory system has been 

 productive of so many evils, physical, moral, and social, 

 who shall say to what new forms of oppression and 

 misery it may give rise in vast workshops peopled by 

 human beings who have no civil rights, and who are 

 superintended by others whose immediate profit may be 

 the greatest when their sufferings are rendered the most 

 unbearable ? 



In the preceding chapter, I have spoken of the direct 

 influence political, religious, and educational which 

 the institutions of the United States are destined to 

 exercise upon our own, and of the gradual assimilation 

 which, should peace and progress continue among them, 

 may be expected to take place between their institutions 

 and ours. 



But this rapid extension of the cotton manufacture in 

 the southern States, and the employment of slave labour 

 in their factories, besides the influence it is likely to have 

 upon the future condition of the slaves and of the slave 



