TENURE OF LANDS. 25 



manufactures or mechanical employments find countenance or 

 encouragement. Every business is consequently in a great 

 degree dependent upon the one great interest of cotton plant- 

 ing, and he who holds the land, commands the labor and sends 

 forward the crop, becomes, as a matter of course, one of the 

 leading spirits of the district, and is in a condition to control 

 the opinions, interests and wills of others. 



Now when we remember that there are probably not more 

 than about two hundred thousand slave-owning planters, and 

 that these collectively own nearly two hundred millions of 

 acres of land, we see at ohce that they are in a situation to 

 become, almost as a matter of course, practically a landed 

 oligarchy, and as such, to exercise a control over all other 

 interests and pursuits. Such a state of society begets that 

 desire of power, that love of dominion, and that restlessness 

 under the restraints of the law which has characterized every 

 oligarchy in a state of which we have any account in history. 

 In France it made the ancient regime before the revolution. 

 In England it sustains her aristocracy, and makes the com- 

 monalty themselves the prop and support of that institution. 

 And in this, as it seems to me, we find a much more potent 

 cause for her sympathy with the South than in any eagerness 

 she may manifest to reach the cotton of the Southern planter. 

 The main difference, however, and it is a lamentable one, 

 between the oligarchy of a body of planters and slaveholders, 

 and the aristocracy of England is, that while the one has 

 become dignified by education and habits, by old names and 

 historic associations, the other rests on none of these, but upon 

 the mere institution of large plantations and labor wrung from 

 a poor, down-trodden, dependent race of beings. While the 

 monarchies of the old world have built up their favored class 

 upon birth and family and the possession of ancestral acres and 

 renowned names, the men who are now seeking to break down 

 the democratic institutions of our free, national government, 

 are striving to build up a system of polity and social organiza- 

 tion upon wliat Mr. Vice-President Stephens, as they are pleased 

 to call him, has told the world was the corner-stone which all 

 builders before them had refused, and that is negro slavery. 

 4 



