ro slavery and its entire exoneration from reproach is a thorough
investigation of fact; ... and political economy ... must ... pronounce our
system ... no disease, but the normal and healthy condition of a society
formed of such mixed material as ours." "The strong race and the weak, the
civilized and the savage," the one by nature master, the other slave, "are
here not only cast together, but have been born together, grown together,
lived together, worked together, each in his separate sphere striving for
the good of each.... These two races of men are mutually assistant to each
other and are contributing in the largest possible degree consistent with
their mutual powers to the good of each other and mankind." A general
emancipation therefore could bring nothing but a detriment.[14]

[Footnote 14: _DeBow's Review_, XXI, 331-349, 443-467 (October and
November, 1856).]

What proved to be the last work in the premises before the overthrow of
slavery in the United States was _The Slave Power, its Character, Career
and Probable Designs_, by J.E. Cairnes, professor of political economy in
the University of Dublin and in Queen's College, Galway. It was published
in 1862 and reissued with appendices in the following year. Cairnes at the
outset scouted the factors of climate and negro racial traits. The sole
economic advantage of slavery, said he, consists in its facilitation
of control in large units; its defects lay in its causing reluctance,
unskilfulness and lack of versatility. The reason for its prevalence in the
South he found in the high fertility and the immense abundance of soil on
the one hand, and on the other the intensiveness of staple cultivation. A
single operative, said he, citing as authority Robert Russell's erroneous
assertion, "might cultivate twenty acres in wheat or Indian corn, but could
not manage more than two in tobacco or three in cotton; therefore the
supervision of a considerable squad is economically feasible in these
though it would not be so in the cereals." These conditions might once have
made slave labor profitable, he conceded; but such possibility was now
doubtless a thing of the distant past. The persistence of the system did
not argue to the contrary, for it would by force of inertia persist as long
as it continued to be self-supporting.

Turning to a different theme, Cairnes announced that slave labor, since it
had never been and never could be employed with success in manufacturing or