John C Calhoun
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: population actually was in every resjiect, the more the former was forced to affect absolute equality with the lowliest of their fellow-citizens. These had to be persuaded that their interests were identical with those of the rich planters ; and, as they had in fact more to suffer from the effects of slavery than the slaves themselves, this could only be accomplished by systematically instilling into them a dull self-conceit and suicidal arrogance, which mistook shreds and tatters for purple and ermine. They looked down upon every other form of civilization with an air of contemptuous superiority, which would have been exceedingly ludicrous, if it had not been infinitely sad. That was an education rendering those who were cursed with it eminently fit to listen to political discussions, and to retail the pr
...etentious and vain political wisdom that had been showered upon them from the stump, in their idle neighborly chats, but making them bad farmers, while unfitting them for everything but farming. The population could never become dense, for the slave, who had to work without the spur of self-interest, tilled the soil, in spite of all overseers and whips, in a manner which, instead of improving it, exhausted it in the shortest possible time. Those who did the work could afford utterly to dispense with thinking, andthe one head of the master could not supply this want, nor did he, in most cases, even try to do so. More and more it became the rule that the planter lived on credit, eating up his crop before it had been harvested; and if he was rich enough to grow richer, the surplus was almost invariably invested in more land and slaves. What did it matter if the rich soil was speedily turned into a barren waste! There were boundless tracts of land of still richer soil left for him to... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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