Turning to a different theme, Cairnes announced that slave labor, since it had never been and never could be employed with success in manufacturing or commercial pursuits, must find its whole use in agriculture; and even there it required large capital, at the same time that the unthrifty habits inculcated in the masters kept them from accumulating funds.  The consequence was that slaveholding society must necessarily be and remain heavily in debt.  The imperative confinement of slave labor to the most fertile soils, furthermore, prevented the community from utilizing any areas of inferior quality; for slaveholding society is so exclusive that it either expels free labor from its vicinity or deprives it of all industrial vigor.  It is true that some five millions of whites in the South have no slaves; but these “are now said to exist in this manner in a condition little removed from savage life, eking out a wretched subsistence by hunting, by fishing, by hiring themselves for occasional jobs, by plunder.”  These “mean whites ... are the natural growth of the slave system; ... regular industry is only known to them as the vocation of slaves, and it is the one fate which above all others they desire to avoid."[15]

[Footnote 15:  First American edition (New York, 1862), pp. 54, 78, 79.]

“The constitution of a slave society,” he says again, “resolves itself into three classes, broadly distinguished from each other and connected by no common interest—­the slaves on whom devolves all the regular industry, the slaveholders who reap all its fruits, and an idle and lawless rabble who live dispensed over vast plains in a condition little removed from absolute barbarism."[16] Nowhere can any factors be found which will promote any progress of civilization so long as slavery persists.  The non-slaveholders will continue in “a life alternating between listless vagrancy and the excitement of marauding expeditions.”  “If civilization is to spring up among the negro race, it will scarcely be contended that this will happen while they are still slaves; and if the present ruling class are ever to rise above the existing type, it must be in some other capacity than as slaveholders."[17] Even as a “probationary discipline” to prepare a backward people for a higher form of civilized existence, slavery as it exists in America cannot be justified; for that effect is vitiated by reason of the domestic slave trade.  “Considerations of economy, ... which under a natural system afford some security for humane treatment by identifying the master’s interest with the slave’s preservation, when once trading in slaves is practised become reasons for racking to the utmost the toil of the slave; for when his place can at once be supplied from foreign preserves the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts.  It is accordingly a maxim of slave management in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth."[18]