still
greater increase of the agricultural Northwest. Besides, Maryland
(omitting slavery) had far greater natural advantages for manufactures
than Massachusetts. She had a more fertile soil, thus furnishing cheaper
food to the working classes, a larger and more accessible coast, and
nearly eight times the length of navigable rivers, greater hydraulic
power, vast superiority in mines of coal and iron, a far more salubrious
climate, cotton, the great staple of modern industry, much nearer to
Maryland, her location far more central for trade with the whole Union,
and Baltimore, her chief city, nearer than Boston to the great West,
viz.: to the Ohio at Pittsburg and Cincinnati, the Mississippi at St.
Louis, and the lakes at Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago, by several
hundred miles. Indeed, but for slavery, Maryland must have been
a far greater manufacturing as well as commercial State than
Massachusetts--and as to agriculture; there could be no comparison.

But Massachusetts did not become a manufacturing State until after the
tariff of 1824. That measure, as well as the whole protective policy,
Massachusetts earnestly opposed in 1820 and 1824, and Daniel Webster, as
her representative, denounced it as unconstitutional. From 1790 to 1820,
Massachusetts was commercial, not manufacturing, and yet, from 1790 to
1820, Massachusetts increased in numbers 144,442, and Maryland in the
same time only 87,622. Yet, from 1790 to 1820, Massachusetts, the most
commercial State, was far more injured by the embargo and the late war
with England than any other State.

It is clear, then, that the accusation of the secession leaders that the
North was built up at the expense of the South, by the tariff, can have
no application to the progress of Massachusetts and Maryland, because
the advance of the former over the latter preceded by more than thirty
years the adoption of the protective policy, and a comparison of the
relative advance of the Free and Slave States, during the same period,
exhibits the same results.

There is one _invariable law_, whether we compare all the Slave States
with all the Free States, small States with small, large with large, old
with old, new with new, retarding the progress of the slaveholding
States, ever operating, and differing in degree only.

The area of the nine Free States enumerated in 1790, is 169,668 square
miles, and of the eight slaveholding States, 300,580 square miles, while
the population of th