ee States. A book by Mr.
Hinton Rowan Helper, _The Impending Crisis of the South_, expresses
these differences in figures so significant that it is impossible to
contest them.

The Southern States, therefore, are certain to increase their cultures,
and to found their lasting prosperity by entering the path that leads to
emancipation. But if they take the contrary road, they will hasten to
their destruction, and with strange rapidity. Already, their violent
acts of secession, and the monstrous plans which are necessarily
attached to them, have had the first effect, easily foreseen, of dealing
a most dangerous blow to American cotton. In a few weeks, they have done
themselves more harm than the North, supposing its hostility as great as
it is little, could have done them in twenty years. The meeting of
Manchester has replied to the manifestoes of Charleston; England has
said to herself, that, from men so determined to destroy themselves, she
should count on nothing; and, having taken her resolution, she will
proceed with it speedily; let the Southern States take care. English
India can produce as much cotton as America; before long, if the
Carolinians persist, they will have obtained the glorious result of
despoiling their country of its chief resource; they will have killed
the hen that laid the golden eggs. The matter is serious; I ask them to
reflect on it. As England, under pain of falling into want and riots,
cannot dispense with cotton for a single day, she will act
energetically. Cotton grows marvellously in many countries; in the
Antilles, where it has been produced already; in Algeria, where the
plantations are about to be increased; on the whole continent of Africa,
in fine, where it enters perhaps into the plans of God thus to make a
breach in indigenous slavery by the faults committed by slaveholders in
America.

CHAPTER X.

THE PRESENT CRISIS WILL REGENERATE THE INSTITUTIONS
OF THE UNITED STATES.

It remains for me to inquire what influence the present crisis may exert
on the institutions of the United States. It is at the expense of these
institutions that the slave States, inferior in strength, in numbers, in
progress of every kind, would reestablish their fatal and growing
preponderance. Here again, therefore, my thesis subsists: the victories
of the South had compromised every thing, the resistance of the North is
about to save every thing; the election of Mr. Lincoln is a painful but
saluta