Improvements in machinery have enabled manufacturers to pay full wages to their operatives, both in this country and in England, and to pay higher prices for their cotton than they did a few years since, without materially enhancing the cost of their goods, the larger product of cloth from a less number of hands and the saving of waste offsetting the higher price of cotton; but it is not probable that the cost of labor upon cotton goods can be hereafter materially reduced.  The cost of labor upon the heavy sheetings and drills which form the larger part of our exports is now only one and one-half cents per yard, and the cost of oil, starch, and all other materials except cotton, less than one-half cent, making less than two cents for cost of manufacturing; but with cotton at ten cents to the planter and twelve and one-half cents to the spinner, the cost of cotton in the yard of same goods is five cents.

With cotton at the average price of the last few years, we have supplied a very small portion of India and China with goods, in competition with their hand-made goods of same material.  With new markets opening in Japan and China, and by the building of railroads in India, we have to meet a constantly decreasing supply of raw material as compared with the demand.  Give us cotton at six to seven cents, at which free labor and skill could well afford it, and the manufacturing industry of New England would receive a development unknown before.  But when we ask more cotton of slavery, we are answered by its great prophet, De Bow; that because we are willing to pay a high price we can not have it; for he says, ’Although land is to be had in unlimited quantities, whenever cotton rises to ten cents, labor becomes too dear to increase production rapidly.’

And this is what the great system of slave labor has accomplished.  The production of its great staple, cotton, is in the hands of less than 100,000 men.  In 1850 there were in all the Southern States only 170,000 men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,800,000 out of 3,300,000.

These men have by their system rendered labor degrading,—­they have driven out their non-slaveholding neighbors by hundreds of thousands to find homes and self-respect in the free air of the great West,—­they have reduced those who remain to a condition of ignorance scarcely to be found in any other country claiming to be civilized—­so low that even the slaves look down upon the ’mean white trash,’—­they have sapped the very foundations of honor and morality, so that ‘Southern chivalry’ has become the synonym for treachery, theft, and dishonor in every form,—­they have reached a depth of degradation only to be equalled by those Northern men who would now prevent this war from utterly destroying slavery,—­they have literally skinned over a vast area of country, leaving it for the time a desert, and with an area of 368,312,320 acres in the eight cotton States, they have now under cultivation in cotton less than 6,000,000 (an area scarcely larger than the little State of Massachusetts); they have less than two slave laborers to the square mile; and their only opposition to the re-opening of the African slave-trade is upon the ground that an increase of laborers will but reduce the price of cotton, give the planters a great deal more trouble and less profit, and only benefit their enemies in New and Old England.