xt day it marches into Washington or
Annapolis, all the better for the process. Another, in order to
encourage the North, it is said that hecatombs of dead were carried
out of Fort Moultrie, packed up, for easy travelling, in boxes. Again,
to irritate both, it is credibly stated that Lord Lyons is going to
interfere, or that an Anglo-French fleet is coming to watch the ports;
and so on, through a wild play of fancy, inexact in line, as though the
batteries were charged with the aurora borealis or summer lightning,
instead of the respectable, steady, manageable offspring of acid and
metal....

I am now, however, dealing with South Carolina, which has been the _fons
et origo_ of the secession doctrines and their development into the full
life of the Confederate States. The whole foundation on which South
Carolina rests is cotton and a certain amount of rice; or rather she
bases her whole fabric on the necessity which exists in Europe for those
products of her soil, believing and asserting, as she does, that England
and France cannot and will not do without them. Cotton, without a
market, is so much flocculent matter encumbering the ground. Rice,
without demand for it, is unsalable grain in store and on the field.
Cotton at ten cents a pound is boundless prosperity, empire, and
superiority, and rice and grain need no longer be regarded.

In the matter of slave labor, South Carolina argues pretty much in this
way: England and France require our products. In order to meet their
wants we must cultivate our soil. There is only one way of doing so. The
white man cannot live on our land at certain seasons of the year; he
cannot work in the manner required by the crops. He must, therefore,
employ a race suited to the labor, and that is a race which will only
work when it is obliged to do so.

[And so on throughout the old argument, which, fortunately, the
logic of time has in great measure disproved. But, leaving this
phase of the subject, we shall accompany our traveller on a
visit to the land of rice and slave labor.]

Early one morning I started in a steamer to visit a plantation in the
Pedee and Maccamaw district, in the island coast of the State, north of
Charleston. Passing Sumter, on which men are busily engaged, under the
Confederate flag, in making good damages and mounting guns, we put out a
few miles to sea, and with the low sandy shore, dotted with soldiers and
guard-houses and clumps of trees,