The fallacy of this reasoning, specious as it might seem, was warmly commented on and exposed by the opposite side. If the Southern slave was to be regarded as any other human being, and as possessed of those inalienable rights which the Declaration of Independence proudly claimed for all humanity, why not at once call him a citizen and give him the right to be represented, not by his master, but by himself? If he was nothing but property, why not speak out openly and attempt to make property the basis of representation, and the Government a tool in the hands of a moneyed aristocracy? It was conceded that the slaveholding States were at that time by far the wealthiest part of the confederacy, but this wealth of slavery was not and could not be an element of power, but rather of weakness and confusion. If it was argued that slaves filled, in the South, the same relative position as free laborers in the North, and their employment necessarily excluded to a great extent the introduction of a population which would otherwise be entitled to representation, then in the same way free and active _mind_, the only thing that deserves to be represented, was likewise excluded. But on a similar principle, the horses, cattle, and even the machinery of the North, which was nothing but a substitute for so much manual labor, were equally entitled to be heard on the floor of Congress. Why should property in one form go to Congress, and be shut out when it takes another and more human one? “The houses in Philadelphia alone,” said Gouverneur Morris, “are worth all the wretched slaves that cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.” He ridiculed the idea of treating the Southern slave as a consumer--“for the Bohea tea used by a Northern Freeman will pay more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable slave, which consists of nothing more than his physical subsistence, and the rag which covers his nakedness.”