What was begun as a study was continued
as a dispute, necessarily endless so long as the political issue remained
active. Many data which would have been illuminating, such as plantation
records and slave price quotations, were never systematically assembled;
and the experience resulting from negro emancipation was then too slight
for use in substantial generalizations. The economist M'Culloch, for
example, concluded from the experience of San Domingo and Jamaica that
cane sugar production could not be sustained without slavery;[20] but the
industrial careers of Cuba, Porto Rico and Louisiana since his time have
refuted him. He, like virtually all his contemporaries in economic thought,
confused the several factors of slavery, race traits and the plantation
system; the consequent liability to error was inevitable.

[Footnote 20: J.R. M'Culloch, _Principles of Political Economy_ (fourth
edition, Edinburgh, 1849), p. 439.]

Economists of later times have nearly all been too much absorbed in current
problems to give attention to a discarded institution. Most of them have
ignored the subject of slavery altogether, and the concern of the rest with
it has been merely incidental. Nicholson, for example, alludes to it as[21]
"one of the earliest and one of the most enduring forms of poverty," and
again as "the original and universal form of bankruptcy." Smart deals with
it only as concerns the care of workingmen's children: "The one good thing
in slavery was the interest of the master in the future of his workers.
The children of the slaves were the master's property. They were always at
least a valuable asset.... But there is no such continuity in the
relation between the employer [of free labor] and his human cattle. The
best-intentioned employer cannot be expected to be much concerned about the
efficient upkeep of the workman's child when the child is free to go where
he likes.... The child's future is bound up with the father's wage. The
wage may be enough, even when low, to support the father's efficiency, but
it is not necessarily enough to keep up the efficiency of the young laborer
on which the future depends."[22] Loria deals more extensively with
slavery as affected by the valuation of labor,[23] and Gibson[24] examines
elaborately the nature of hypothetically absolute slavery in analyzing the
earnings of labor. The contributions of both Loria and Gibson will be used
below. The economic bearings of the institution in h