benevolent despotism. He was one of the first few to
see that chattel slavery could not compete in efficiency with white
labor, and he reckoned that more money could be made from the white
laborer, for whom no responsibility of shelter, clothing, food and
attendance had to be assumed than from the negro slave, whose sickness,
disability or death entailed direct financial loss. Before his death he
emancipated a number of his slaves. This, in brief, is the rather
flattering depiction of one of the conspicuously rich planters of the
South.

THE NASCENT TRADING CLASS.

Land continued to be the chief source of the wealth of the rich until
after the Revolution. The discriminative laws enacted by England had
held down the progress of the trading class; these laws overthrown, the
traders rose rapidly from a subordinate position to the supreme class in
point of wealth.

No close research into pre-Revolutionary currents and movements is
necessary to understand that the Revolution was brought about by the
dissatisfied trading class as the only means of securing absolute
freedom of trade. Notwithstanding the view often presented that it was
an altruistic movement for the freedom of man, it was essentially an
economic struggle fathered by the trading class and by a part of the
landed interests. Admixed was a sincere aim to establish free political
conditions. This, however, was not an aim for the benefit of all
classes, but merely one for the better interests of the propertied
class. The poverty-stricken soldiers who fought for their cause found
after the war that the machinery of government was devised to shut out
manhood suffrage and keep the power intact in the hands of the rich. Had
it not been for radicals such as Jefferson, Paine and others it is
doubtful whether such concessions as were made to the people would have
been made. The long struggle in various States for manhood suffrage
sufficiently attests the deliberate aim of the propertied interests to
concentrate in their own hands, and in that of a following favorable to
them, the voting power of the Government and of the States.

With the success of the Revolution, the trading class bounded to the
first rank. Entail and primogeniture were abolished and the great
estates gradually melted away. For more than a century and a half the
landed interests had dominated the social and political arena. As an
acknowledged, continuous organization they ceased to exist. Great
es