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will so exactly coincide with Southern interests, as a rapid emigration of freemen into these new Territories. White free labor, doubly productive over slave labor in grain-growing, must be multiplied within their limits, that the cost of provisions may be reduced and the extension of slavery and the growth of cotton suffer no interruption. The present efforts to plant them with slavery, are indispensable to produce sufficient excitement to fill them speedily with a free population; and if this whole movement has been a Southern scheme to cheapen provisions, and increase the ratio of the production of sugar and cotton, as it most unquestionably will do, it surpasses the statesman-like strategy which forced the people into an acquiescence in the annexation of Texas. And should the anti-slavery voters succeed in gaining the political ascendency in these Territories, and bring them as free States triumphantly into the Union; what can they do, but turn in, as all the rest of the Western States have done, and help to feed slaves, or those who manufacture or who sell the products of the labor of slaves. There is no other resource left, either to them or to the older free States, without an entire change in almost every branch of business and of domestic economy. Reader, look at your bills of dry goods for the year, and what do they contain? At least three-fourths of the amount are French, English, or American cotton fabrics, woven from slave labor cotton. Look at your bills for groceries, and what do they contain? Coffee, sugar, molasses, rice--from Brazil, Cuba, Louisiana, Carolina; while only a mere fraction of them are from free labor countries. As now employed, our dry goods' merchants and grocers constitute an immense army of agents for the sale of fabrics and products coming, directly or indirectly, from the hand of the slave; and all the remaining portion of the people, free colored, as well as white, are exerting themselves, according to their various capacities, to gain the means of purchasing the greatest possible amount of these commodities. Nor can the country, at present, by any possibility, pay the amount of foreign goods consumed, but by the labor of the slaves of the planting States. This can not be doubted for a moment. Here is the proof: Commerce supplied us, in 1853, with foreign articles, for consumption, to the value of $250,420,187, and accepted, in exchange, of our provisions, to the value of but $33
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