s,
the owners and all dependent upon it will stand appalled and prostrate,
as the sot whose liquor has been withheld, and nothing but the bad and
worthless habit left to remind the country of its ruinous effects. The
political economist, as well as all wise statesmen in this country, cannot
think of any measure going to discharge slavery that would not be a worse
state than its existence." His own remedy for the depression prevailing at
the time when he wrote, was to divert a large proportion of the slaves from
the glutted business of staple agriculture into manufacturing, for which he
thought them well qualified.[11] Equally fantastic were the ideas of H.C.
Carey of Pennsylvania who dealt here and there with slavery in the course
of his three stout volumes on political economy. His lucubrations are
negligible for the present survey.

[Footnote 11: [N.A. Ware] _Notes on Political Economy as applicable to the
United States_. By a Southern Planter (New York, 1844), pp. 200-204.]

All these American writers except Goodloe accomplished little of
substantial quality in the field of economic thought beyond adding details
to the doctrines of Adam Smith and Say. John Stuart Mill in turn did little
more than combine the philosophies of his predecessors. "It is a truism
to assert," said he, "that labour extorted by fear of punishment is
insufficient and unproductive"; yet some people can be driven by the
lash to accomplish what no feasible payment would have induced them to
undertake. In sparsely settled regions, furthermore, slavery may afford
the otherwise unobtainable advantages of labour combination, and it has
undoubtedly hastened industrial development in some American areas. Yet,
since all processes carried on by slave labour are conducted in the rudest
manner, virtually any employer may pay a considerably greater value in
wages to free labour than the maintenance of his slaves has cost him and be
a gainer by the change.[12]

[Footnote 12: John Stuart Mill, _Principles of Political Economy_ (London,
1848, and later editions), book II, chap. 5.]

Partly concurring and partly at variance with Mill's views were those which
Edmund Ruffin of Virginia published in a well reasoned essay of 1857, _The
Political Economy of Slavery_. "Slave labor in each individual case and for
each small measure of time," he said, "is more slow and inefficient than
the labor of a free man." On the other hand it is more continuous, for
hirelings