e the facts, however, let a few reflections which belong
to the subject be weighed.

The people of these five slave States are now, and ever have been, an
agricultural people. The people of the New England States are a
commercial and manufacturing people. New England has, in proportion to
numbers, the richest and most extensive commerce in the world. In
manufacturing skill and enterprise, they have no superiors on the globe.
They have ever reproached the South for investing their income in
slavelabor, in preference to commerce and manufactures. It has been the
settled conviction among nations, that investments in commerce and
manufactures give the greatest, and those in agriculture the smallest
profits. It is the settled conviction of the non-slaveholding States
that investments in slave labor, for agricultural purposes, is the worst
of all investments, and tends greatly to lessen its profits. This has
been proclaimed to the South so long by our Northern neighbors, that
many here have been brought to believe it, and to regret the existence
of slavery among us on that account, if on no other. With these
observations we turn to the census.

The census of 1850 tells us that New England, with a population now
numbering two million seven hundred, and twenty-eight thousand and
sixteen, with all the advantages of a commercial and manufacturing
investment, and with the most energetic and enterprising free men on
earth, to give that investment its greatest productiveness, has
accumulated wealth, in something over two hundred years, to the amount
of one billion three million four hundred and sixty-six thousand one
hundred and eighty-one dollars; while these five slave States, with an
equal population, have, in the same time, accumulated wealth to the
amount of one billion four hundred and twenty million nine hundred and
eighty-nine thousand five hundred and seventy-three dollars.

Here we see the indisputable fact that these five agricultural States,
with slavery, have accumulated an excess of aggregate wealth over the
amount accumulated in New England in the same time, of four hundred and
seventeen million five hundred and twenty-three thousand three hundred
and two dollars--so that the property belonging to New England, if
equally divided, would give to each citizen but three hundred and
sixty-seven dollars, while that belonging to the five slave States, if
equally divided, would give to each citizen the sum of five hundred a