immensely important factor in American industrial life, and consequently an immensely important factor in American political life as well. Just a word in passing regarding the character of Southern labor. It was, as you all know, mainly agricultural. Its enforced ignorance, and its legally and morally degraded condition, incapacitated the slave-holding States from diversifying their single industry and limited them to the tillage of the earth. This feature was economically the fatal defect of the slave industrial system in its rivalry with the free industrial system of the North. There were, of course, other forms of labor employed in the South, such as the house-servant class, while many of the Negroes on plantations and in Southern cities worked as carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, harness-makers, millwrights, wheelwrights, barbers, tailors, stevedores, etc., etc.; but, as labor classes, they were relatively of slight importance in point of numbers, and as wealth producers, in comparison to the field hand. Unlike the Indian under similar circumstances, the Negro did not succumb to the terrible toil and inhumanity of his environment. He did not decline numerically, nor show any tendency to do so, but exhibited instead extraordinary vitality and reproductive vigor. In physical quality and equipment he was, as a laborer, ideally adapted to the South, and accordingly augmented enormously in social and commercial value to that section, and in numbers, at the same time. He possessed, besides, certain other traits which fitted him peculiarly to his hard lot and task. He was of laborers the most patient, the most submissive, the most faithful, the most cheerful. He was capable of the strongest affection and of making the greatest sacrifices for those to whom he belonged. In his simple and untutored heart there was no desire for vengeance, and in his brave black hands he bore nothing but gifts to the South--gifts of golden leisure, untold wealth, baronial pleasure and splendor, infinite service, and withal, a phenomenal effacement of himself. Economically weak, yet singularly favored by a fortuitous combination of circumstances, slave labor flourished and expanded until at length it came into rough contact and rivalry with modern industrialism as it leaped into life under the magical influence of free institutions in the non-slaveholding half of the Union.