e account, return laden with
our money to enjoy their easily earned opulence at home."

Southern statisticians, not satisfied with generalities, attempted to
figure out how great was this tribute in dollars and cents. They
estimated that the planters annually lent to Northern merchants the full
value of their exports, a hundred millions or more, "to be used in the
manipulation of foreign imports." They calculated that no less than
forty millions all told had been paid to shipowners in profits. They
reckoned that, if the South were to work up her own cotton, she would
realize from seventy to one hundred millions a year that otherwise went
North. Finally, to cap the climax, they regretted that planters spent
some fifteen millions a year pleasure-seeking in the alluring cities and
summer resorts of the North.

=Southern Opposition to Northern Policies.=--Proceeding from these
premises, Southern leaders drew the logical conclusion that the entire
program of economic measures demanded in the North was without exception
adverse to Southern interests and, by a similar chain of reasoning,
injurious to the corn and wheat producers of the West. Cheap labor
afforded by free immigration, a protective tariff raising prices of
manufactures for the tiller of the soil, ship subsidies increasing the
tonnage of carrying trade in Northern hands, internal improvements
forging new economic bonds between the East and the West, a national
banking system giving strict national control over the currency as a
safeguard against paper inflation--all these devices were regarded in
the South as contrary to the planting interest. They were constantly
compared with the restrictive measures by which Great Britain more than
half a century before had sought to bind American interests.

As oppression justified a war for independence once, statesmen argued,
so it can justify it again. "It is curious as it is melancholy and
distressing," came a broad hint from South Carolina, "to see how
striking is the analogy between the colonial vassalage to which the
manufacturing states have reduced the planting states and that which
formerly bound the Anglo-American colonies to the British empire....
England said to her American colonies: 'You shall not trade with the
rest of the world for such manufactures as are produced in the mother
country.' The manufacturing states say to their Southern colonies: 'You
shall not trade with the rest of the world for such manufac