[Footnote 82:  Philip V. Fithian, Journal and Letters (Princeton, 1900), p. 145.]

[Footnote 83:  H.A.  Garland, Life of John Randolph (New York 1851), II, 215.]

[Footnote 84:  Southern Agriculturist, I, 151-163.]

The remorseless advance of slave prices as measured in their produce tended to spread the adverse conditions noted by Elliott into all parts of the South; and by the close of the ’fifties it is fairly certain that no slaveholders but those few whose plantations lay in the most advantageous parts of the cotton and sugar districts and whose managerial ability was exceptionally great were earning anything beyond what would cover their maintenance and carrying charges.

Achille Loria has repeatedly expressed the generalization that slaves have been systematically overvalued wherever the institution has prevailed, and he has attempted to explain the phenomenon by reference to an economic law of his own formulation that capitalists always and everywhere exploit labor by devices peculiarly adapted to each regime in turn.  His latest argument in the premises is as follows:  Man, who is by nature dispersively individualistic, is brought into industrial coordination only by coercion.  Isolated labor if on exceptionally fertile soil or if equipped with specially efficient apparatus or if supernormal in energy may produce a surplus income, but ordinarily it can earn no more than a bare subsistence.  Associative labor yields so much greater returns that masters of one sort or another emerge in every progressive society to replace dispersion with concentration and to engross most of the accruing enhancement of produce to themselves as captains of industry.  This “persistent and continuous coercion, compelling them to labour in conformity to a unitary plan or in accordance with a concentrating design” is commonly in its earlier form slavery, and slaveholders are thus the first possessors of capital.  As capitalists they become perpetually concerned with excluding the laborers from the proprietorship of land and the other means of production.  So long as land is relatively abundant this can be accomplished only by keeping labor enslaved, and enslavement cannot be maintained unless the slaves are prevented from buying their freedom.  This prevention is procured by the heightening of slave prices at such a rate as to keep the cost of freedom always greater than the generality of the slaves can pay with their own accumulated savings or peculia.  Slave prices in fact, whether in ancient Rome or in modern America, advanced disproportionately to the advantage which the owners could derive from the ownership.  “This shows that an element of speculation enters into the valuation of the slave, or that there is a hypervaluation of the slave. This is the central phenomenon of slavery; and it is to this far more than to the indolence of slave labour that is due the low productivity of slave states,