110 Progress of Population and Wealth 



the products of but a smaller portion of the earth's surface can fall 

 to the share of one individual. In this progressive declension of 

 its value, labour will finally attain a price so low, that the earnings 

 of a slave will not repay the cost of rearing him, when, of course, 

 his master will consider him as a burdensome charge rather than 

 a source of profit ; and as the same decline in the value of labour 

 once liberated the villeins or slaves of western Europe, and will 

 liberate the serfs of Russia, so must it put an end to slavery in the 

 United States, should it be terminated in no other way. 



This may be called the euthanasia of the institution, as it will be 

 abolished with the consent of the master no less than the wishes of 

 the slave ; and the period of termination will be sooner reached 

 because the labour of slaves, by reason of the inferiority in industry, 

 economy, and skill, inseparable from their condition, is less produc- 

 tive than that of freemen. 



But this depression in the value of labour will reach the different 

 States at different periods of time, and it will advance more slowly 

 as we proceed south. Yet the facility with which slaves can be 

 transported from one State to another, will countervail much of 

 this difference ; and slave labour, in the more northern of the slave- 

 holding States, will not greatly decline in price so long as it is very 

 profitable in the more southern. If Maryland, Virginia, and North 

 Carolina were insulated from the rest, then, at no very distant day, 

 slave labour in those States, with its inherent disadvantages, would 

 not more than defray the cost of its maintenance ; but so long as 

 their slaves can be readily transferred to other States, they will 

 retain a value in every State proportionate and approaching to their 

 value in other States. This would, moreover, be the case, if the 

 trade in slaves, now carried on, were interdicted, and their impor- 

 tation were permitted only in those cases in which they migrate 

 with the families of proprietors, so many of whom are ever seeking 

 to improve their condition in the south and the west. We must, 

 therefore, in our estimates of the future progress and duration of 

 slavery, regard all the slaveholding States as one community for a 

 Considerable time to come ; and expect that, if the institution remains 

 undisturbed by State legislation, (for that of the United States is 

 riot only unwarranted by the constitution, but is inconsistent with 

 ai continuance of the Union,) they will all approach to the same 

 density of slave population, except so far as it may be affected by 

 diversities of soil and other local circumstances. 



The slaveholding States and territories had, in 1840, a population 



