This intrenched the slave plantations yet more strongly in their local
domination, and by that very fact it hampered industrial development. Great
landed proprietors, it is true, have oftentimes been essential for making
beneficial innovations. Thus the remodeling of English agriculture which
Jethro Tull and Lord Townsend instituted in the eighteenth century could
not have been set in progress by any who did not possess their combination
of talent and capital.[10] In the ante-bellum South, likewise, it was the
planters, and necessarily so, who introduced the new staples of sea-island
cotton and sugar, the new devices of horizontal plowing and hillside
terracing, the new practice of seed selection, and the new resource of
commercial fertilizers. Yet their constant bondage to the staples debarred
the whole community in large degree from agricultural diversification, and
their dependence upon gangs of negro slaves kept the average of skill and
assiduity at a low level.
[Footnote 10: R.E. Prothero, _English Farming, past and present_, (London,
1912), chap. 7.]
The negroes furnished inertly obeying minds and muscles; slavery provided a
police; and the plantation system contributed the machinery of direction.
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