It can not be denied that even in the best stages of slaveholding there had been a good deal of commerce in slaves where the feelings of these chattels were in no wise regarded. Still, there was a prevailing sentiment among all the slaveholders of the gentler sort that it was in a way disgraceful to part families. I distinctly recall, when I was a lad, some years before the civil war, my maternal grandfather often charged me to remember that I came of a people who had never bought or sold a slave except to keep families together. I know that this was a common feeling among the better men of Kentucky and Virginia, and that the practice of rearing negroes for the Southern market filled them with sorrow and indignation. Yet the change was the inevitable result of the system and of the advancing commercialism which separated the plantation life more and more from that of the owner's household. At the time when the civil war began the institution of slavery was, from the commercial point of view, eminently successful. Notwithstanding the occasional appearance of the spendthrift slave owner in Northern pleasure resorts or in Europe, the great plantations were generally in charge of able business men, who won a large interest on their investments and who were developing the system of planting in a way which, though it appeared to those who were accustomed to close tillage as shiftless, was really well adjusted to the conditions. Not one fourth of the land of the Southern States that was well fitted for the work of slaves had been brought into use. The blacks who were carefully managed in all that regarded their health and in their morals, so far as might affect their breeding, were in admirable physical condition, and rapidly increasing in numbers. It is doubtful if ever a peasant class was so well cared for or so freed from avoidable diseases. The growing protest against the institution, so far as it operated in the South, was practically limited to the border States, mainly to Kentucky, where alone did a considerable number of well-born men set themselves against it. There is good reason to believe that if the civil war had not occurred the end of the nineteenth century would have seen a negro population in the South much more numerous than we now have there. Experience has shown that the American cotton crop is little affected by foreign competition, so that it would have maintained the success of the institution.