eclared Captain Dillingham. "Do you wonder
that Abraham Lincoln thought it would be worth even a war to rid this
country of such an evil? Understand, I am not condemning all slave
owners. Undoubtedly there were kind and humane ones just as there are
to this day employers who are fair with their help. But urged on by
commercial greed the temptation of the planters was to force the slaves
to do more than was right, and as a result a great deal of cruelty was
practiced. Had the primitive method of picking cotton by hand continued
it is probable that slavery might have died a natural death without
recourse to war, for many of the Southerners were reaching a point
where the returns from cotton and tobacco were not sufficient to feed
the army of slaves that swarmed over the plantations. To use a common
phrase the slaves were eating their heads off. It was just at this
juncture, however, that Eli Whitney came along with his cotton gin and
in a twinkling the South became revolutionized and the problem of the
legion of idle, profitless slaves was settled. They would now be idle
and profitless no longer. Vast quantities of cotton could henceforth be
planted and the negroes could cultivate and gather it. With Eli
Whitney's gin to do the slow and hindering part of the process
cotton-raising could be made a paying industry."

"Mr. Whitney bobbed up in the very nick of time, didn't he?" smiled
Mary.

"For the financial prosperity of the South he did," her uncle
responded. "But to the welfare of the negroes his advent was a fatal
stroke. Slaves immediately were more in demand than they ever had been
before. No mechanical device could take their place. Cotton must be
planted, cultivated, and harvested by hand and the larger the cotton
fields became, the harder the slaves were worked. The cotton crop
became the staple product of the South. Many a Southerner who took up
arms against the Union did so because he honestly believed that to free
the slaves would mean the economic ruin of his section of the country."

"I never thought of that side of the question before," Mrs. McGregor
murmured thoughtfully.

"Nor I," rejoined Carl.

"Nevertheless it is a fact none of us here in the North should forget,"
continued Captain Dillingham. "To the southern planter our point of
view appeared unfair and grossly one-sided. It was easy enough for the
North to say the slaves should be freed. They had no cotton fields and
their prosperity was not de