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States adopted--codes deliberately framed to prevent any improvement in
the condition of the slave population and to make impossible even their
peaceful and voluntary emancipation.

There was yet another factor, the economic one, which to most modern
writers, starting from the basis of historical materialism, has
necessarily seemed the chief of all. It was really, I think, subsidiary,
but it was present, and it certainly helped to intensify the evil. It
consisted in the increased profitableness of Slavery, due, on the one
hand, to the invention in America of Whitney's machine for extracting
cotton, and, on the other, to the industrial revolution in England, and
the consequent creation in Lancashire of a huge and expanding market for
the products of American slave labour. This had a double effect. It not
only strengthened Slavery, but also worsened its character. In place of
the generally mild and paternal rule of the old gentlemen-planters came
in many parts of the South a brutally commercial _regime_, which
exploited and used up the Negro for mere profit. It was said that in
this further degradation of Slavery the agents were often men from the
commercial North; nor can this be pronounced a mere sectional slander
in view of the testimony of two such remarkable witnesses as Abraham
Lincoln and Mrs. Beecher Stowe.

All these things tended to establish the institution of Slavery in the
Southern States. Another factor which, whatever its other effects,
certainly consolidated Southern opinion in its defence, was to be found
in the activities of the Northern Abolitionists.

In the early days of the Republic Abolition Societies had existed
mainly, if not exclusively, in the South. This was only natural, for,
Slavery having disappeared from the Northern States, there was no
obvious motive for agitating or discussing its merits, while south of
the Mason-Dixon line the question was still a practical one. The
Southern Abolitionists do not appear to have been particularly unpopular
with their fellow-citizens. They are perhaps regarded as something of
cranks, but as well-meaning cranks whose object was almost everywhere
admitted to be theoretically desirable. At any rate, there is not the
suspicion of any attempt to suppress them; indeed, the very year before
the first number of the _Liberator_ was published in Boston, a great
Conference of Anti-Slavery Societies, comprising delegates from every
part of the South, met at Balti