-painfully
so--and it is not a matter of indifference to learn that at last there
is a reaction of intelligence in our favor, and that light is breaking
through the bewildering mists which once veiled the truth.

In discussing 'the economic basis of slavery,' Professor Cairnes deals
out truths with a prompt vigor which is truly admirable. From Stirling,
Olmsted, Sewell, and others, he disposes of the old falsehood that only
the negro can endure the Southern climate--a fact but recently
_generally_ made known at the North--that isothermal lines do not follow
the parallels of latitude--and that it is a gross error to believe the
black incapable of improvement as a freeman. He admits that slave labor
has its advantages, in being absolutely controllable, and in returning
the whole fruit of its labor to the owner. It may, therefore, be
combined on an extensive scale, and its cost is trifling. But, on the
other hand, slave labor is given reluctantly, and is consequently a
losing means, unless much of it can be concentrated under the eye of one
overseer. It is unskillful, because the slave cannot be educated; and,
therefore, having once learned one thing, he must be kept at that for
life.

The result of this is that, as the slave, unlike the free farm-laborer,
cannot (with rare exceptions) be profitably employed at aught save
agriculture, and indeed only at one branch of that, he soon exhausts the
soil. If all the blacks in the South were capable of laboring at
rotation of crops, they would soon be free. Slavery has always of itself
died out in the wheat and corn regions--because, in raising cereals,
labor is more widely dispersed than in cotton or tobacco planting, and
the workers are more difficult to oversee. Hence the constant
immigration from the wornout to the new plantation, and the cry for new
land; and hence the admission, by the most intelligent men of the South,
that to prevent the extension of slavery would be to destroy it. Free
labor flourishes even on barren soils--ingenuity is stimulated and
science developed. But slave labor requires abundance of fertile soil
and a branch of culture demanding combination and organization of large
masses of labor and its _concentration_.

Yet, in spite of these facts, a writer in the London _Saturday Review_
informs the English public that the rapid deterioration of the soil
under slave labor is a popular fallacy! Could the gentleman who gives
this information so glibly, exa