MR. stone'saddress. 39 



The degradation of white labor, is another evil that slavery 

 inflicts on southern agriculture. A farmer who cannot afford 

 to own a slave, and therefore holds his own plough, and han- 

 dles his own hoe, rake and fork, is placed, by the common 

 law of public opinion, in an inferior rank, from which, if he 

 would rise, he must go where field labor is reputable. If he 

 possesses the honorable ambition of a man, he seeks a new 

 home in a free state, and his small farm is annexed to the plan- 

 tation whose owner boasts his scores of bondmen. The ten- 

 dency of this false standard of respectability is, to banish the 

 " small farmers," and to accumulate landed property in a few 

 hands — an effectual method of depreciating its value. But for 

 this impediment to free labor, Kentucky, for example, (where 

 are some of the best lands in the United States, and where 

 farming may be pursued with the most desirable success,) 

 would fast fill up with an enterprising agricultural population, 

 and her prosperity keep pace with her sister confederates on 

 the northern shore of the Ohio. 



Slavery is an evil to Northern agriculture, because it wages 

 war upon those pursuits with which farming is vitally con- 

 nected. Independent of the sentiments of humanity and 



events, with a relatively dense population of freemen. But it may boldly be said that Vir- 

 ginia possesses scarcely a single requisite to make a prosperous slave labor state. She has not the 

 inexhaustible rich soils: her earth originally yielded fair returns to hard labor judiciously di- 

 rected, but all such soils, as she has learned by bitter experience, are fated, under the 

 hands of slaves, to deterioration down to utter barrenness. 



We state as the result of extensive inquiry, embracing the last fifteen years, that a very 

 great proportion of the larger plantations, with from fifty to one hundred slaves, actually bring 

 their proprietors in debt at the end of a short term of years, notwithstanding what would 

 once in Virginia have been deemed very sheer economy ; that much the larger part of the 

 considerable landholders are content, if they barely meet their plantation expenses without 

 a loss of capital; and that, of those who make any profit, it will in none but rare instances 

 average more than one to one and a half per cent, on the capital invested. Labor of every 

 species is disreputable, because performed Mostly by slaves. If cultivated by free labor, 

 the soil of Virginia is capable of sustaining a dense population, among whom labor would 

 be honorable, and where " the busy hum of men" would tell that all were happy, and that 

 all were free. Where slave labor prevails, it is scarcely practicable for free labor to co- 

 exist with it to any great extent. Freedom being itself regarded as a privilege in a nation 

 that has slaves, there is a natural tendency to consider exemption from manual labor as the 

 chief mark of elevation above the class of slaves." 



