The slaveholders form a powerful landed aristocracy, banded together for the preservation of their own privileges, and ever endeavoring, for obvious reasons, to identify their private interests with the public welfare. Thus have the landed proprietors of England declaimed loudly on the blessings of dear bread, because the corn laws keep up rents and the price of land. The wealth and influence of your aristocracy, together with your own poverty, have led you to look up to them with a reverence bordering on that which is paid to a feudal nobility by their hereditary dependents. Hence it is, that, unconscious of your own power, you have permitted them to assume, as of right, the whole legislation and government of your respective States. We now propose to call your attention to the practical results of that control over _your_ interests, which, by your sufferance, they have so long exercised. We ask you to join us in the inquiry how far you have been benefitted by the care of your guardians, when compared with the people of the North, who have been left to govern themselves. We will pursue this inquiry in the following order: 1. Increase of Population. 2. State of Education. 3. State of Industry and Enterprise. 4. Feeling towards the Laboring Classes. 5. State of Religion. 6. State of Morals. 7. Disregard for Human Life. 8. Disregard for Constitutional Obligations. 9. Liberty of Speech. 10. Liberty of the Press. 11. Military Weakness. I. INCREASE OF POPULATION. The ratio of increase of population, especially in this country, is one of the surest tests of public prosperity. Let us then again listen to the impartial testimony of the late census. From this we learn that the increase of population in the free States from 1830 to 1840, was at the rate of 38 per cent., while the increase of the _free_ population in the slave States was only 23 per cent. Why this difference of 15 in the two ratios? No other cause can be assigned than slavery, which drives from your borders many of the virtuous and enterprising, and at the same time deters emigrants from other States and from foreign countries from settling among you. The influence of slavery on population is strikingly illustrated by a comparison between Kentucky and Ohio. These two States are of nearly equal areas, Kentucky however having about 3000 square miles more than the other.[3] They are separated only by a river, and are both remarkable for the fertility of their soil; but one has, from the beginning, been cursed with slavery, and the other blessed with freedom. Now mark their respective careers. [3] American Almanac for 1843, p. 206. In 1792, Kentucky was erected into a State, and Ohio in 1802. Free population of Kentucky. Free population of Ohio.