Those who sought the truth merely were in
general short of data; those who could get the facts in any fullness were
too filled with partisan purpose. What was begun as a study was continued
as a dispute, necessarily endless so long as the political issue remained
active. Many data which would have been illuminating, such as plantation
records and slave price quotations, were never systematically assembled;
and the experience resulting from negro emancipation was then too slight
for use in substantial generalizations. The economist M'Culloch, for
example, concluded from the experience of San Domingo and Jamaica that
cane sugar production could not be sustained without slavery;[20] but the
industrial careers of Cuba, Porto Rico and Louisiana since his time have
refuted him. He, like virtually all his contemporaries in economic thought,
confused the several factors of slavery, race traits and the plantation
system; the consequent liability to error was inevitable.
[Footnote 20: J.R. M'Culloch, _Principles of Political Economy_ (fourth
edition, Edinburgh, 1849), p. 439.]
Economists of later times have nearly all been too much absorbed in current
problems to give attention to a discarded institution.
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