lly reduced. The cost of labor
upon the heavy sheetings and drills which form the larger part of our
exports is now only one and one-half cents per yard, and the cost of
oil, starch, and all other materials except cotton, less than one-half
cent, making less than two cents for cost of manufacturing; but with
cotton at ten cents to the planter and twelve and one-half cents to the
spinner, the cost of cotton in the yard of same goods is five cents.

With cotton at the average price of the last few years, we have supplied
a very small portion of India and China with goods, in competition with
their hand-made goods of same material. With new markets opening in
Japan and China, and by the building of railroads in India, we have to
meet a constantly decreasing supply of raw material as compared with the
demand. Give us cotton at six to seven cents, at which free labor and
skill could well afford it, and the manufacturing industry of New
England would receive a development unknown before. But when we ask more
cotton of slavery, we are answered by its great prophet, De Bow; that
because we are willing to pay a high price we can not have it; for he
says, 'Although land is to be had in unlimited quantities, whenever
cotton rises to ten cents, labor becomes too dear to increase production
rapidly.'

And this is what the great system of slave labor has accomplished. The
production of its great staple, cotton, is in the hands of less than
100,000 men. In 1850 there were in all the Southern States only 170,000
men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,800,000 out of
3,300,000.

These men have by their system rendered labor degrading,--they have
driven out their non-slaveholding neighbors by hundreds of thousands to
find homes and self-respect in the free air of the great West,--they
have reduced those who remain to a condition of ignorance scarcely to be
found in any other country claiming to be civilized--so low that even
the slaves look down upon the 'mean white trash,'--they have sapped the
very foundations of honor and morality, so that 'Southern chivalry' has
become the synonym for treachery, theft, and dishonor in every
form,--they have reached a depth of degradation only to be equalled by
those Northern men who would now prevent this war from utterly
destroying slavery,--they have literally skinned over a vast area of
country, leaving it for the time a desert, and with an area of
368,312,320 acres in the eight