Compared with such a
gain to the consuming classes, what would it matter that the producers
were "expended" every four or five years, thereby furnishing an
argument in favor of the revival (we should say extension, for it
appears to be lively enough) of the slave-trade between Africa and
America? So is it with Mexican cotton, which propagates itself, and is
not raised annually from the seed, as in our cotton-growing States. In
the Hot Land of Mexico, the laborers in the cotton-fields merely keep
these fields clear from weeds, as we should say,--no easy task, it may
be assumed, with a soil so luxuriant, and where frost is unknown. Yet
the amount of cotton produced annually in the Hot Land is shamefully
small, not exceeding ten million pounds,--a mere bagatelle, which
Manchester would devour in a week. Consider what an increase in cottons
and calicoes, what a gain in shirts and sheets, would follow from the
seizure of those fields by Americans from Mississippi and Alabama; and
let no idle notions concerning national morality prevent the increase
of those comforts which the poor now know, but which never came to the
knowledge of Caesar Augustus, and which were unknown to Solomon in all
his glory.
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