ew state to the
people. But there was an exception, and on this exception hangs our tale,
and turns the dark drama of our national history.

Those founders had to deal with many novel and perplexing problems of
construction, but none seemed so difficult to handle as were those which
grew out of the presence of African slavery, as an industrial system, in
several of the States. At the threshold of national existence these men
were constrained by circumstances to make an exception to the primary
principles which they had placed at the bottom of their untried and bold
experiment in popular government. This sacrifice of fundamental truth
carried along with it one of the sternest retributions of history. For it
involved the admission on equal footing into the Union of a fundamental
error in ethics and economics, with which our new industrial democracy was
forced presently to engage in deadly strife for existence and
survivorship.

The American fathers were, undoubtedly, aware of the misfortune of
admitting under one general government, and on terms of equality, two
mutually invasive and destructive social ideas and their corresponding
systems of labor. But they were baffled at the time by what appeared to be
a political necessity, and so met the grand emergency of the age by
concession and a spirit of conciliation. Many of them, indeed, desired on
economic as well as on moral grounds the abolition of slavery, and
probably felt the more disposed to compromise with the evil in the general
confidence with which they regarded its early and ultimate extinction.

This humane expectation of the young republic failed of realization, owing
primarily and chiefly, I think, to the potent influence upon the
institution of slavery of certain labor-saving inventions and their
industrial application in England and America during the last quarter of
the eighteenth century. These epoch-making inventions were the spinning
jenny of Hargreaves, the spinning machine of Arkwright and the mule of
Crompton, in combination with the steam engine, which turned, says John
Richard Green, "Lancastershire into a hive of industry." And last, though
not least in its direct and indirect effects on slavery, was the cotton
gin of Eli Whitney, which formed the other half--the other hand, so to
speak--of the spinning frame. The new power loom in England created a
growing demand for raw cotton, which the American contrivance enabled the
Southern planter to meet