could be done at little expense in agriculture, where even the light workers were made to support themselves. But had a planter gone into a mining section, where he could get no land, for corn to feed his slaves and stock, and for cotton to bring him money, he would have found no margin of profit whatever in mining. I was reared in the gold-bearing district of Georgia. I can remember old Mr. John Wynne, a wealthy cotton planter living in Oglethorpe county, some six or seven miles from my father's, who, when--to use plantation parlance--he had laid by his crop at the middle or end of July, would work his gold mine until cotton-picking became brisk about the middle of September. He made money out of his gold mine, without injuring his other far more valuable mine, that is, the natural increase of his negroes. And I heard of other such mine workers. But you could not have tempted one of these shrewd business men to settle with his slaves outside of a cotton-making district in order to mine. Had either Mr. Clingman or Mr. Mason--mentioned by Mr. Lodge--made the trial, he would have soon returned to his old neighborhood a sadder and wiser man. The negro's work as a slave in the coal and iron mines of the south never commenced until after the thirteenth amendment freed him. Since then he has done much cruelly hard work as _servus poenae_--a slave of punishment--in these mines, for convict lessees, having no other interest in him than to get all the labor possible during his term. So it is clear that Webster, in contending that the conditions in these Territories were prohibitive of slavery was as statesmanly and perspicacious as he was generally in other matters.