The other point is the relative improvement of the soil. According to the census of 1860, there were _four_ acres of improved land to each inhabitant of the North, appraised, with their rateable proportion of stock and implements, at $223. This gives about $56 for each acre and its stock. In the South, on the other hand, each inhabitant claims _nine_ acres of improved land, valued, with their stock and implements, at $322. This allows about $36 for each acre and its stock. It has been argued that this evinces the slovenly and imperfect agriculture of the slaveholding States, and the comparative exhaustion of their soils. It is said, their rude tillage is spread over a far wider surface, and conducted with inferiour appointments. And this depreciating result slavery has brought about, they assert, in spite of superiour natural advantages. We remark that, contrary to the usual assertion, the natural fertility was superiour in the free States. The soil of the Middle States had a better natural average than that of the old Atlantic slave States, and the North-western States had a vastly larger proportion of fertile lands than the South-western. In the next place, the agriculture of the South is of such a character that it requires a wider area; and yet this requirement argues nothing of its greater imperfection. It may require more space to fly a kite than to spin a top, and yet it does not follow that the kite-flying is less skillful sport than the top-spinning. An iron manufactory must necessarily cover more ground than a chemical laboratory; but no one argues thence, that the ironmonger is less a master of his trade than the manufacturer of drugs, of his. Last: the fact that the Southern planter accounts the labour of his farm as property, and so, as a part of his invested capital, causes a lower nominal valuation of his lands, though there be no inferiority of actual production. Grain and grass lands in the county of Rockingham have always sold higher than grain and grass lands in the county of Albemarle, which were actually yielding the same products annually. The former were tilled by free labour, and the latter by slave; but the Albemarle farming was confessedly as skillful, as economical, and as profitable, as the Rockingham. The explanation is the following: The Rockingham farmer, hiring his free labour, needed no more capital for this purpose than was sufficient to pay the wages of a few months in advance of the realization of his crop. The Albemarle farmer expended a large portion of his farming capital in the purchase of slaves, and afterwards paid no money in hire. The former, investing twenty thousand dollars in agriculture, could expend the whole sum in land, except what was required to stock it and pay wages for a few months. Thus he would begin by buying three hundred acres of land for eighteen thousand dollars. But the slaveholding farmer began by expending eight thousand