indirect influence of free labour is so potent that it can go across Mason's and Dixon's line, or the Ohio River, into the midst of the very blight and curse of slavery, and act so happily as to raise the price of slave-tilled lands to eighty dollars per acre; while its direct influences at home, on a soil uncursed with slavery, cannot sustain the price of exactly similar land at sixty dollars! And we are required to believe that while the mere shadow of slavery, falling across the border, sinks the price of land, otherwise blessed with the most profitable system, to sixty dollars, the actual incubus of the horrid monster on a soil unredeemed by the better system, raises it to eighty dollars! Common sense shows us the true solution. Two farms divided only by the imaginary line of the surveyor, of course differ nothing in the natural advantages of soil, climate and productions. Why, then, did the Virginian farm sell for twenty dollars more per acre? Because the owner could combine all the economy and efficiency of a system of slave labour, with the partial advantages of the system of free labour near him; and thus make his farm more profitable than his Pennsylvanian neighbour. But we are told that actual inspection showed the labour of the South to be wasteful, shiftless, and expensive, as compared with the free labour of the North. We reply, if it seemed so in any case, it is because the comparison is unfairly made. On the Northern side, the specimen is selected near some great city, in some "crack farming district," where the labour is stimulated by abundant capital, supplied with costly implements, and directed by the best skill of that section. On the Southern side, the specimen was taken from some ill-informed population, or some soil originally thin, and in a community depressed and depleted by the iniquitous taxation of Yankee tariffs. But let the best of each be compared; or the _medium_ specimens of each; or the worst of each; and we fearlessly abide the test. Where slave labour was directed by equal skill and capital, it is shown to be as efficient as any in America. There was nowhere on our continent, more beautiful, more economical, or more remunerative farming, than in our densest slaveholding communities. A third argument against the economy of slave labour, is thus stated by Dr. Wayland: "It removes from both parties, the disposition and the motives to _frugality_. Neither the master learns frugality from the necessity of labour, nor the slave from the benefits which it confers," etc.