In a community so unenlightened as yours, it is a matter of course, that the arts and sciences must languish, and the industry and enterprise of the country be oppressed by a general torpor. Hence multitudes will be without regular and profitable employment, and be condemned to poverty and numberless privations. The very advertisements in your newspapers show that, for a vast proportion of the comforts and conveniences of life, you are dependent on Northern manufacturers and mechanics. You both know and feel that slavery has rendered labor disgraceful among you; and where this is the case, industry is necessarily discouraged. The great staple of the South is cotton; and we have no desire to undervalue its importance. It, is however, worthy of remark, that its cultivation affords a livelihood to only a small proportion of the free inhabitants; and scarcely to any of those we are now addressing. Cotton is the product of slave labor, and its profits at home are confined almost exclusively to the slaveholders. Yet on account of this article, we hear frequent vaunts of the agricultural riches of the South. With the exception of cotton, it is difficult to distinguish your agricultural products arising from slaves, and from free labor. But admitting, what we know is not the fact, that _all_ the other productions of the soil are raised _exclusively_ by free labor, we learn from the census, that the agricultural products of the North exceed those of the South, cotton excepted, $226,219,714. Here then we have an appalling proof of the paralyzing influence of slavery on the industry of the whites. In every community a large portion of the inhabitants are debarred from drawing their maintenance directly from the cultivation of the earth. Other and lucrative employments are reserved for them. If the slaveholders chiefly engross the soil, let us see how you are compensated by the encouragement afforded to mechanical skill and industry. In 1839 the Secretary of the Treasury reported to Congress, that the tonnage of vessels built in the United States was 120,988 Built in the slave States and Territories 23,600 Or less than one-fifth of the whole! But the difference is still more striking, when we take into consideration the comparative _value_ of the shipping built in the two regions: In the free States the value is $6,311,805 In the slave do. 704,291[6] [6] See American Almanac for 1843, page 153. It would be tedious and unprofitable to compare the results of the different branches of manufacture carried on at the North and the South. It is sufficient to state that, according to the census, the value of the manufactures In the free States are $334,139,690 In the slave States 83,935,742