I have shown that the increase of production must depend upon the increase of labour, because every other element is in abundance--soil, climate, and so forth. (A Voice: 'How about sugar?') A Gentleman asks about sugar. If in any particular year there was an extravagant profit upon cotton, there might be, and there probably would be, some abstraction of labour from the cultivation of tobacco, and rice, and sugar, in order to apply it to cotton, and a larger temporary increase, of growth might take place; but I have given you the facts with regard to the last twenty years, and I think you will see that my statement is correct. Now, can this be remedied under slavery? I will show you how it cannot. And first of all, everybody who is acquainted with American affairs knows that there is not very much migration of the population of the Northern States into the Southern States to engage in the ordinary occupations of agricultural labour. Labour is not honourable and is not honoured in the South; and therefore free labourers from the North are not likely to go South. Again, of all the emigration from this country-- amounting as it did, in the fifteen years from 1846 to 1860, to two millions five hundred thousand persons, being equal to the whole of the population of this great city--a mere trifle went South and settled there to pursue the occupation of agriculture; they remained in the North, where labour is honourable and honoured. Whence, then, could the planters of the South receive their increasing labour? Only from the slave-ship and the coast of Africa. But, fortunately for the world, the United States Government has never yet become so prostrate under the heel of the slave-owner as to consent to the reopening of the slave-trade. Therefore the Southern planter was in this unfortunate position: he could not tempt, perhaps he did not want, free labourers from the North; he could not tempt, perhaps he did not want, free labourers from Europe; and if he did want, he was not permitted to fetch slave labour from Africa. Well, that being so, we arrive at this conclusion--that whilst the cultivation of cotton was performed by slave labour, you were shut up for your hope of increased growth to the small increase that was possible with the increase of two and a half per cent per annum in the population of the slaves, about one million in number, that have been regularly employed in the cultivation of cotton.