,472 lbs., instead of the actual crop of 1,305,152,800 lbs.; and
would not only have failed to supply any for export, but have barely
supplied the home demand, and been _minus_ the total crop of that year,
by 945,844,328 lbs.

In this estimate, some allowance, perhaps, should be made, for the
greater fertility of the new lands, more recently brought under
cultivation; but the difference, on this account, can not be equal to
the difference in the crops of the several periods, as the lands, in the
older States, in 1820, were yet comparatively fresh and productive.

Again, the dependence of the South upon the North, for its provisions,
may be inferred from such additional facts as these: The "Abstract of
the Census," for 1850, shows, that the production of wheat, in Florida,
Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, averaged, the year
preceding, very little more than a peck, (it was 27/100 of a bushel,) to
each person within their limits. These States must purchase flour
largely, but to what amount we can not determine. The shipments of
provisions from Cincinnati to New Orleans and other down river ports,
show that large supplies leave that city for the South; but what
proportion of them is taken for consumption by the planters, must be
left, at present, to conjecture. These shipments, as to a few of the
prominent articles, for the four years ending August 31, 1854, averaged
annually the following amounts:

Wheat flour brls. 385,204
Pork and Bacon lbs. 43,689,000
Whisky gals. 8,115,360

Cincinnati also exports eastward, by canal, river and railroad, large
amounts of these productions. The towns and cities westward send more of
their products to the South, as their distance increases the cost of
transportation to the East. But, in the absence of full statistics, it
is not necessary to make additional statements.

From this view of the subject, it appears that slavery is not a
self-sustaining system, independently remunerative; but that it attains
its importance to the nation and to the world, by standing as an agency,
intermediate, between the grain-growing States and our foreign commerce.
As the distillers of the West transformed the surplus grain into
whisky, that it might bear transport, so slavery takes the products of
the North, and metamorphoses them into cotton, that they may bear
export.

It seems, indeed, when the whole of t