The foregoing is the barest outline of the rise and conflict between the two nationalizations. The subject has been neglected too long. There begins to be some faint understanding of the greater nationalization, but that understanding is far short of completeness. There is hardly a suspicion of the other. And yet as to our own special subject it is really the more important, for in it is the initiative of the brothers' war. There has been made by nobody any investigation at all of the main parts of that train of events which I designate as southern nationalization. Not Wilson's "The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in the United States," nor any book by a partisan of either side in the struggle, gives any help towards this investigation. The historical sources have never been studied at all; such as the colonial records now publishing, the records and papers of the probate court in some of the older and more important counties of the south--especially the returns of administrators, executors, and guardians, and files of newspapers advertising their citations. Here can be found the prevailing prices of slaves, their rate of multiplication, all details of their management, from the very beginning. The trial and equity courts contain records of litigation about slaves; of advice of chancellors to trustees seeking to make or change investment; of wills manumitting slaves; and a thousand other relevant matters. The course of legislation as to slaves from the first to the end is also important. From these, from local literature such as "Georgia Scenes," "Simon Suggs," biography, and various pamphlets, and other original sources,--far better historical evidence than any which is now generally invoked,--can be learned the real facts as to the growth of slavery; and especially how in its economic potency consequent upon the invention of the gin it supplanted or made dependent upon itself all other property, and became the solitary foundation of every kind of production and mode of making a living; so that even by 1820 to abolish slavery would have been almost to beggar the southern people for two or three generations. It is to be hoped that Professor Brown, finding the opportunity which he desires, may yet exhaust not only the sources I have mentioned, but also important ones that I have not even thought of, and give the true ante-bellum history of the lower south. Some such work is necessary to explain the active principle, the _raison d'etre_ of southern nationalization.