the entire census of 1820; and of that gain the North
secured forty-one and the South but twenty-seven per cent. The slave
population increased but twenty-three per cent. At this rate of increase
the year 1900 will see a population of one hundred millions in the
Union, of whom nine millions will be negroes, and a vast majority of the
white population located in territory now free. Between 1820 and 1860
five million emigrants reenforced the Union, of which the North received
the greater portion. Between the war of 1814 and 1860, Great Britain and
Ireland sent to us more people than inhabited the thirteen States that
formed the Union, and of this immigrant population there was an excess
of nine hundred and fifty thousand _men_--a nation poured in upon the
great, free North, to reenforce the people.

Already was this increase of free population telling upon slave labor in
Slave States. Even in the Gulf cities Sambo was fast receding before the
brawny arms of Hans and Patrick. Northwestern Texan was becoming a new
Germany. Western Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware were rapidly
losing in slave labor; while along the border had grown up a line of ten
cities in Slave States, containing six hundred thousand people, of whom
less than ten thousand were slaves. This line of cities, from Wilmington
Delaware, to St. Louis, Missouri, was becoming a great cordon of
free-labor citadels; supported in the rear by another line of Free
Border-State cities, stretching from Philadelphia to Leavenworth,
containing nine hundred thousand; thus _massing a free population of one
million five hundred thousand in border cities that overlooked the land
of despotism_.

Then consider the growth of free agriculture. In 1860 the South had a
cotton and rice crop as her exclusive possession. Already the Northwest
was encroaching upon her sugar cultivation. Against her agriculture,
mainly supported by one great staple, which can also be cultivated all
round the globe, the free North could oppose every variety of crop;
several of greater value than the boasted cotton. In all the grains, in
cattle and the products of the dairy, in hay, in fruits; in the superior
cultivation of land; in the vastly superior value of land; in
agricultural machinery, probably representing a labor force equal to all
the slaves--the superiority of freedom was too evident for discussion.
_The value of agricultural machinery in the Free States had trebled
between 1850 and