All these American writers except Goodloe accomplished little of substantial quality in the field of economic thought beyond adding details to the doctrines of Adam Smith and Say.  John Stuart Mill in turn did little more than combine the philosophies of his predecessors.  “It is a truism to assert,” said he, “that labour extorted by fear of punishment is insufficient and unproductive”; yet some people can be driven by the lash to accomplish what no feasible payment would have induced them to undertake.  In sparsely settled regions, furthermore, slavery may afford the otherwise unobtainable advantages of labour combination, and it has undoubtedly hastened industrial development in some American areas.  Yet, since all processes carried on by slave labour are conducted in the rudest manner, virtually any employer may pay a considerably greater value in wages to free labour than the maintenance of his slaves has cost him and be a gainer by the change.[12]

[Footnote 12:  John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London, 1848, and later editions), book II, chap. 5.]

Partly concurring and partly at variance with Mill’s views were those which Edmund Ruffin of Virginia published in a well reasoned essay of 1857, The Political Economy of Slavery.  “Slave labor in each individual case and for each small measure of time,” he said, “is more slow and inefficient than the labor of a free man.”  On the other hand it is more continuous, for hirelings are disposed to work fewer hours per day and fewer days per year, except when wages are so low as to require constant exertion in the gaining of a bare livelihood.  Furthermore, the consolidation of domestic establishments, which slavery promotes, permits not only an economy in the purchase of supplies but also a great saving by the specialization of labor in cooking, washing, nursing, and the care of children, thereby releasing a large proportion of the women from household routine and rendering them available for work in the field.  An increasing density of population, however, would depress the returns of industry to the point where slaves would merely earn their keep, and free laborers would of necessity lengthen their hours.  Finally a still greater glut of labor might come, and indeed had occurred in various countries of Europe, carrying wages so low that only the sturdiest free laborers could support themselves and all the weaker ones must enter a partial pauperism.  At such a stage the employment of slaves could only be continued at a steady deficit, to relieve themselves from which the masters must resort to a general emancipation.  In the South, however, there were special public reasons, lying in the racial traits of the slave population, which would make that recourse particularly deplorable; for the industrial collapse ensuing upon emancipation in the British West Indies on the one hand, and on the other the pillage and massacre which occurred in San Domingo and the disorder still prevailing there, were alternative examples of what might be apprehended from orderly or revolutionary abolition as the case might be.  The Southern people, in short, might well congratulate themselves that no ending of their existing regime was within visible prospect.[13]