es for their part, while
willing enough to buy of any merchant within reach, rarely had either money
or credit.

Towns grew, of course, at points on the seaboard where harbors were good,
and where rivers or railways brought commerce from the interior. Others
rose where the fall line marked the heads of river navigation, and on the
occasional bluffs of the Mississippi, and finally a few more at railroad
junctions. All of these together numbered barely three score, some of which
counted their population by hundreds rather than by thousands; and in the
wide intervals between there was nothing but farms, plantations and thinly
scattered villages. In the Piedmont, country towns of fairly respectable
dimensions rose here and there, though many a Southern county-seat could
boast little more than a court house and a hitching rack. Even as regards
the seaports, the currents of trade were too thin and divergent to permit
of large urban concentration, for the Appalachian water-shed shut off
the Atlantic ports from the commerce of the central basin; and even the
ambitious construction of railroads to the northwest, fostered by the
seaboard cities, merely enabled the Piedmont planters to get their
provisions overland, and barely affected the volume of the seaboard trade.
New Orleans alone had a location promising commercial greatness; but her
prospects were heavily diminished by the building of the far away Erie
Canal and the Northern trunk line railroads which diverted the bulk of
Northwestern trade from the Gulf outlet.

As conditions were, the slaveholding South could have realized a
metropolitan life only through absentee proprietorships. In the Roman
_latifundia_, which overspread central and southern Italy after the
Hannibalic war, absenteeism was a chronic feature and a curse. The
overseers there were commonly not helpers in the proprietors' daily
routine, but sole managers charged with a paramount duty of procuring
the greatest possible revenues and transmitting them to meet the urban
expenditures of their patrician employers. The owners, having no more
personal touch with their great gangs of slaves than modern stockholders
have with the operatives in their mills, exploited them accordingly. Where
humanity and profits were incompatible, business considerations were likely
to prevail. Illustrations of the policy may be drawn from Cato the Elder's
treatise on agriculture. Heavy work by day, he reasoned, would not only
increa