of Carolina in 1832,
"enriches the North, and ruins the South; for if this were not the case,
to what can we attribute the continually increasing power and wealth
of the North, with its inclement skies and arid soil; whilst the South,
which may be styled the garden of America, is rapidly declining?" *q

[Footnote q: See the report of its committee to the Convention which
proclaimed the nullification of the tariff in South Carolina.]

If the changes which I have described were gradual, so that each
generation at least might have time to disappear with the order of
things under which it had lived, the danger would be less; but the
progress of society in America is precipitate, and almost revolutionary.
The same citizen may have lived to see his State take the lead in the
Union, and afterwards become powerless in the federal assemblies; and
an Anglo-American republic has been known to grow as rapidly as a man
passing from birth and infancy to maturity in the course of thirty
years. It must not be imagined, however, that the States which lose
their preponderance, also lose their population or their riches: no stop
is put to their prosperity, and they even go on to increase more
rapidly than any kingdom in Europe. *r But they believe themselves to be
impoverished because their wealth does not augment as rapidly as that of
their neighbors; any they think that their power is lost, because they
suddenly come into collision with a power greater than their own: *s
thus they are more hurt in their feelings and their passions than
in their interests. But this is amply sufficient to endanger the
maintenance of the Union. If kings and peoples had only had their true
interests in view ever since the beginning of the world, the name of war
would scarcely be known among mankind.

[Footnote r: The population of a country assuredly constitutes the
first element of its wealth. In the ten years (1820-1830) during which
Virginia lost two of its representatives in Congress, its population
increased in the proportion of 13.7 per cent.; that of Carolina in the
proportion of fifteen per cent.; and that of Georgia, 15.5 per cent.
(See the "American Almanac," 1832, p. 162) But the population of Russia,
which increases more rapidly than that of any other European country,
only augments in ten years at the rate of 9.5 per cent.; in France, at
the rate of seven per cent.; and in Europe in general, at the rate of
4.7 per cent. (See "Malte Brun," vol