l the other
states. Commerce between free and slave states is not reciprocal or
equal. Who can measure the increase that would have been made to the
industry and prosperity of the free states, if all the slaves in the
country had been freemen, with all the wants and energies of freemen?
And their masters had had all the thrift, industry, frugality and
enterprise of men who depend upon their own labor, instead of the labor
of slaves, for their prosperity? Great Britain thought it policy to
carry on a seven years' war against us principally to secure to herself
the control and benefits of the commerce of three millions of people and
their posterity. But we now have nearly or quite the same number of
slaves within our borders, and yet we think that commerce with them and
their posterity is a matter with which we have no concern; that there is
"_no propriety_" in that provision of the national constitution, which
requires that the general government--which we have invested with the
exclusive control of all commerce among the several states--should
secure to these three millions the right of traffic with their fellow
men, and to their fellow men the right of traffic with them, against the
impertinent usurpations and tyranny of subordinate governments, that
have no constitutional right to interfere in the matter.

Again. The slave states, in proportion to their population, contribute
nothing like an equal or equitable share to the aggregate of national
wealth. It would probably be within the truth to say that, in proportion
to numbers, the people of the free states have contributed ten times as
much to the national wealth as the people of the slave states. Even for
such wealth as the culture of their great staple, cotton, has added to
the nation, the south are indebted principally, if not entirely, to the
inventive genius of a single northern man.[26] The agriculture of the
slave states is carried on with rude and clumsy implements; by listless,
spiritless and thriftless laborers; and in a manner speedily to wear out
the natural fertility of the soil, which fertility slave cultivation
seldom or never replaces. The mechanic arts are comparatively dead among
them. Invention is utterly dormant. It is doubtful whether either a
slave or a slave holder has ever invented a single important article of
labor-saving machinery since the foundation of the government. And they
have hardly had the skill or enterprise to apply any of those i