[Footnote 9:  Sir Charles Lyell, Second Visit to the United States, (London, 1850), II, 162, 163.]

One of the consequences was to keep foreign immigration small.  In the colonial period the trade in indentured servants recruited the white population, and most of those who came in that status remained as permanent citizens of the South; but such Europeans as came during the nineteenth century were free to follow their own reactions without submitting to a compulsory adjustment.  Many of them found the wage-earning opportunity scant, for the slaves were given preference by their masters when steady occupations were to be filled, and odd jobs were often the only recourse for outsiders.  This was an effect of the slavery system.  Still more important, however, was the repugnance which the newcomers felt at working and living alongside the blacks; and this was a consequence not of the negroes being slaves so much as of the slaves being negroes.  It was a racial antipathy which when added to the experience of industrial disadvantage pressed the bulk of the newcomers northwestward beyond the confines of the Southern staple belts, and pressed even many of the native whites in the same direction.

This intrenched the slave plantations yet more strongly in their local domination, and by that very fact it hampered industrial development.  Great landed proprietors, it is true, have oftentimes been essential for making beneficial innovations.  Thus the remodeling of English agriculture which Jethro Tull and Lord Townsend instituted in the eighteenth century could not have been set in progress by any who did not possess their combination of talent and capital.[10] In the ante-bellum South, likewise, it was the planters, and necessarily so, who introduced the new staples of sea-island cotton and sugar, the new devices of horizontal plowing and hillside terracing, the new practice of seed selection, and the new resource of commercial fertilizers.  Yet their constant bondage to the staples debarred the whole community in large degree from agricultural diversification, and their dependence upon gangs of negro slaves kept the average of skill and assiduity at a low level.

[Footnote 10:  R.E.  Prothero, English Farming, past and present, (London, 1912), chap. 7.]

The negroes furnished inertly obeying minds and muscles; slavery provided a police; and the plantation system contributed the machinery of direction.  The assignment of special functions to slaves of special aptitudes would enhance the general efficiency; the cooerdination of tasks would prevent waste of effort; and the conduct of a steady routine would lessen the mischiefs of irresponsibility.  But in the work of a plantation squad no delicate implements could be employed, for they would be broken; and no discriminating care in the handling of crops could be had except at a cost of supervision which was generally prohibitive.  The whole establishment would work with success only when the management fully recognized and allowed for the crudity of the labor.