in the United States in Fifty Years. 113 



part of Europe, population and the arts have advanced at the same 

 rate ; and the ascertained slowness of the rate supposes straitened 

 means of subsistence in every stage of the progress. This is con- 

 clusively proved, as to England, by the fact that her population, 

 which, in 1377, had been 2,350,000, had increased in 1800, that is, 

 in 423 years, only to 8,872,980 ; since nothing but great difficulty 

 in obtaining the means of subsistence, and extreme discomfort with 

 the great mass of the people, could have retarded the period of 

 duplication with our progenitors to upwards of two hundred years ! 

 Now, although the standard of comfort for the free labourer is not 

 necessarily that for the slave, yet, in the same country and at the 

 same time, the last will approximate to the first 1 — at least, that has 

 hitherto been the case in the United States, where animal food 

 always constitutes a part of the daily aliment of the slave. 



3. The difference of husbandry. Agriculture is doubtless much 

 less skilful and productive in the United States than it is in England 

 at the present day ; but it is probably much more so than it was in 

 that country at the period to which we refer. Of all, or nearly all, 

 the improvements in husbandry, whether taught by experience or 

 science, our agriculturists readily avail themselves ; and the chief 

 difference between the two countries is, that the labour which there 

 neatly tills a small surface, here slovenly tills a large one. 



Of these diversities, the effect of the last is to make the rate of 

 density that is inconsistent with slavery greater here than it was in 

 England, and that of the second is to make it smaller. Let us 

 suppose that the two neutralize each other ; and that the more libe- 

 ral consumption of the slave in the United States is compensated 

 by the superiority of their tillage to that which prevailed in Eng- 

 land at the supposed era. If, then, we make a deduction from the 

 assumed density of 66 to the square mile, for the greater natural 

 fertility of England, which we will suppose to be greater than that 

 of the slaveholding States by one-fourth, that is, as 100 to 75, then 

 the density, which in those States will be found inconsistent with 

 profit from domestic slavery, will be reduced to about 50 persons 

 to the square mile. 



Should this moderate degree of density be considered inadequate to 

 the effect here ascribed to it, it must be recollected that adult slave 

 labour may still be profitable, though it may not be sufficiently so 

 to defray the expense of rearing it from infancy ; and that the pay- 

 ment of this expense is assumed to be an indispensable condition to 

 the continuance of the institution. In any country less populous 

 10* 



