Now, we do not boast that we can offer a perfect remedy. But our system of labour certainly gave us a partial one of inestimable value. Where the rich man is a citizen of a hireling State, his accumulated wealth and profuse income are all spent in superfluities, except the small portion needed for the comforts of life for his own family. But when he is a citizen of a slave State, they are first taxed with the comfortable support of his slaves. The law, public opinion, affection for them, and self-interest, all compel him to make the first appropriation out of that profuse income, to feeding and clothing his slaves, before he proceeds to superfluities. Thus, the proceeds of the accumulations which dense population and social prosperity cause, are rescued from a useless and mischievous expenditure in those luxuries, the purchase of which misdirects public industry, and tempts to a deficient production of the necessaries of life; and are directed where benevolence, mercy, and the public good indicate, to the comfortable maintenance of the labouring people. That this is the effect of domestic slavery on the incomes of the rich, is proved by one familiar fact. It is well known at the South how slaveholders usually murmured when comparing their style of living with that of capitalists in the hireling States of equal nominal wealth. The planter who owned fifty thousand dollars worth of fertile lands, and a hundred slaves, while he lived in far more substantial comfort and plenty, displayed in Virginia far less ostentation and luxury than the merchant or manufacturer of the North who owns the same amount of capital. His house was plainly furnished with the old-fashioned goods of his fathers; his family rode in a plain carriage, drawn by a pair of stout nags which, probably, either did a fair share of ploughing also, or drew a large part of the fuel for the household. He himself was dressed partly in "jeans," woven under the superintendence of his wife; and his boys were at school in a log house, with homespun clothing, and, in summer, bare feet. It was not unusual to hear the slaveholder, when he considered this contrast, complain of slavery as a bad institution for the master. But this was its merciful feature, that it in some measure arrested superfluous luxury, and taxed superfluous income with the more comfortable support of the labourers. In a hireling State, these might be left half-starved on the inadequate compensation which the hard law of supply and demand in the labour-market would compel them to accept, while the capitalist was rioting in a mischievous waste of the overgrown profits of his capital.