ouncing the manufacturing system of Henry Clay. One ship, he
would say, sufficed, in those happy days, for all the commerce of that
part of Virginia with the Old World, and that ship was named the
London Trader. When this ship was about to sail, all the family were
called together, and each member was invited to mention the articles
which he or she wanted from London. First, the mother of the family
gave in her list; next the children, in the order of their ages; next,
the overseer; then the _mammy_, the children's black nurse; lastly,
the house servants, according to their rank, down even to their
children. When months had passed, and the time for the ship's return
was at hand, the weeks, the days, the hours were counted; and when the
signal was at last descried, the whole household burst into
exclamations of delight, and there was festival in the family for many
days.

How picturesque and interesting! How satisfactory to the tory mind!
But alas! this system of exhausting the soil in the production of
tobacco by the labor of slaves, and sending for all manufactured
articles to England, was more ruinous even than it was picturesque. No
middle class could exist, as in England, to supply the waste of
aristocratic blood and means; and in three generations, rich and
beautiful Virginia, created for empire, was only another Ireland. But
it was a picturesque system, and John Randolph, poet and tory,
revelled in the recollection of it. "Our Egyptian taskmasters," he
would say, meaning the manufacturers of Pennsylvania, New York, New
Jersey, and New England, "only wish to leave us the recollection of
past times, and insist upon our purchasing their vile _domestic_
stuffs; but it won't do: no wooden nutmegs for old Virginia."

His own pecuniary history was an illustration of the working of the
system. His father left forty thousand acres of the best land in the
world, and several hundred slaves, to his three boys; the greater part
of which property, by the early death of the two elder brothers, fell
to John. As the father died when John was but three years old, there
was a minority of eighteen years, during which the boy's portion
should have greatly increased. So far from increasing, an old debt of
his father's--a _London_ debt, incurred for goods brought to a joyous
household in the London Trader--remained undiminished at his coming of
age, and hung about his neck for many years afterward. Working two
large estates, with a fo