Contending as his main theme
that protective tariffs were of no injury to the plantation interests, he
asserted that slave labor was incomparably cheaper than free, and attempted
to prove it by ignoring the cost of capital and by reckoning the price
of bacon at four cents a pound and corn at fifteen cents a bushel. Then,
curiously, he delivered himself of the following: "When slavery shall have
run itself out or yielded to the changes and ameliorations of the times,
the owners and all dependent upon it will stand appalled and prostrate,
as the sot whose liquor has been withheld, and nothing but the bad and
worthless habit left to remind the country of its ruinous effects. The
political economist, as well as all wise statesmen in this country, cannot
think of any measure going to discharge slavery that would not be a worse
state than its existence." His own remedy for the depression prevailing at
the time when he wrote, was to divert a large proportion of the slaves from
the glutted business of staple agriculture into manufacturing, for which he
thought them well qualified.[11] Equally fantastic were the ideas of H.C.
Carey of Pennsylvania who dealt here and there with slavery in the course
of his three stout volumes on political economy.
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