To sum up: Slavery disqualified the white men and women of the south for the domestic and business management proper to this era; and ever since emancipation the presence of a large number of negroes available for labor in house and on the farm, and preventing the coming in of any other labor, has powerfully helped both races in their efforts naturally made to retain the familiar ways of the old system. Thus the south has been sadly retarded in her due economical rehabilitation. In the second place, it has kept the political influence of labor at the minimum, and consequently sent her backwards in true democracy, while England, the English colonies, and the northern States, are slowly but surely going forward. These are the main things. Let me in briefest mention suggest some of their results, which, at first blush, seem to be independent. Slavery engendered among the whites a disrespect for labor, which, although now at last dying out, is still of hurtful influence. As negroes were always and everywhere in number sufficient to do every task of labor, there was but little demand for labor-saving machines and methods--a fact which prevented the southern whites from developing the inventive faculty equally with their northern brothers. We all are beginning to see that, except in much of agriculture and other activities in which the process is that of nature and not of art, the future of industry belongs more and more to the constantly improving machine. Think of such things as these in the brood of evils brought forth by slavery;--agriculture primitive or superannuated in many particulars; our entire structure of investment, production, and occupation bottomed upon slaves, property in which could be, and was, totally destroyed by a stroke of the pen; immigration both from Europe and the north repelled; slowness in exploiting our water power and mines; inferior common schools, and lack of town-meeting government due to the sparseness of the population and their roving habits which were incident to the plantation system. I have given some consideration to these in the "Old and New South," and I refer you to that.[142] Of course had there never been any negro slavery in America we should have escaped the brothers' war, its spilling of blood, its waste of wealth, and the long sickness of the section unto death which has ensued. And to-day in solid prosperity, institutions, government, and progressiveness in everything good, the section would be abreast of the other. Nay, her better climate, her agricultural products--especially her cotton, which she would have learned to make with white labor--these and other resources would, I fully believe, have by this time pushed her far into the lead. As it actually is, she is far, far behind. She has been sorely scourged, not for any moral guilt. "Some innocents 'scape not the thunderbolt."