was imaginary only. What matters it whether
a landlord employing ten laborers on his farm gives them annually as
much money as will buy them the necessaries of life, or gives them
those necessaries at short hand? The ten laborers add as much wealth
annually to the State, increase its exports as much, in the one case
as the other. Certainly five hundred freemen produce no more profits,
no greater surplus for the payment of taxes, than five hundred slaves.
Therefore the State in which are the laborers called freemen, should
be taxed no more than that in which are those called slaves. Suppose,
by any extraordinary operation of nature or of law, one half the
laborers of a State could in the course of one night be transformed
into slaves,--would the State be made the poorer, or the less able to
pay taxes? That the condition of the laboring poor in most
countries,--that of the fishermen, particularly, of the Northern
States,--is as abject as that of slaves. It is the number of laborers
which produces the surplus for taxation; and numbers, therefore,
indiscriminately, are the fair index of wealth. That it is the use of
the word "property" here, and its application to some of the people of
the State, which produces the fallacy. How does the Southern farmer
procure slaves? Either by importation or by purchase from his
neighbor. If he imports a slave, he adds one to the number of laborers
in his country, and proportionably to its profits and abilities to pay
taxes; if he buys from his neighbor, it is only a transfer of a
laborer from one farm to another, which does not change the annual
produce of the State, and therefore should not change its tax; that if
a Northern farmer works ten laborers on his farm, he can, it is true,
invest the surplus of ten men's labor in cattle; but so may the
Southern farmer working ten slaves. That a State of one hundred
thousand freemen can maintain no more cattle than one of one hundred
thousand slaves; therefore they have no more of that kind of property.
That a slave may, indeed, from the custom of speech, be more properly
called the wealth of his master, than the free laborer might be called
the wealth of his employer: but as to the State, both were equally its
wealth, and should therefore equally add to the quota of its tax.

Mr. HARRISON (of Virginia) proposed, as a compromise, that two slaves
should be counted as one freeman. He affirmed that slaves did not do
as much work as freemen, and dou