The commerce of the south was non-reciprocal. She traded raw produce for manufactures which she should have made herself, or which she should have got in exchange for manufactures of her own. The over-mastering energy of slave property, dissolving, as it were, all things into itself, kept her from that development of trades, manufactories, and industrial arts which is the solid and unprecedented progress, and far more durable wealth, of the north. There were a few exceptions in the way of restorative agriculture, and of diversified investments of capital in railways, manufactories, inland navigation, and mercantile enterprises. All along the northern border there were efforts to let go slavery, and non-slave industry was slowly emerging in a few places; but these things were as dust in the balances. The slave system was rooted in the best portions of the land, and nearly all of the productive wealth of the south was in, or dependent upon, planting. Implacable enemies of slavery were rapidly increasing in numbers and power, but she continued blindly sacrificing everything to rear negroes. When actual emancipation came--that nipping May frost--the south showed, on a gigantic scale, in her poverty and one solitary and portentously dried-up source of wealth, a parallel to Ireland, smitten with famine by the sudden failure of her only supply of food. When the charity of the world and the returning bounty of nature had again fed the Green Isle, everything fell back into the old track, and she could go on smoothly as before. But not so with the south: her wealth has fled; her occupation, the plantation system, is gone; and she must, for a generation, grope painfully in the dark, trying novel ways of subsisting, enduring want and many failures, before finding again the light of plenty and comfort. The duties of the planter have changed. The management of a farm is not like that of a plantation, and one skilled in the management of slaves is not necessarily efficient in the directing of freedmen. Many other countries have been impoverished by wars; but is not this instantaneous and almost complete taking away of a great people's mode of living unique in history? The most resolute secessionist would have lost heart and put up his sword, could he have seen, before the war commenced, how easily the solitary prop of southern wealth and comfort could be overturned, to be set up no more. But in none of the ablest of the anti-secession arguments of 1860 were the consequences of defeat predicted.