The first fact is the part played by tobacco and cotton before the anti-slavery sentiment became influential. At a time when there was practically no industry but agriculture these two staples became the most lucrative of all common American crops. Tobacco found its true soil in Virginia, and cotton farther south. It developed in time that both could be made far more profitably with African slaves than by free white labor, the only other labor to be had. Of course you are to remember that slave cultivation of tobacco did not become general in Virginia until near the end of the seventeenth century, and that it was the invention of the gin soon after the adoption of the federal constitution in 1789 that started cotton production on a large scale. What you are especially to grasp here is the economic conditions which naturally spread slavery from its beginning at Jamestown, first over Virginia, and then throughout the entire south, either settled in large measure from Virginia, or looking thither for example. The Virginian who could not replace his exhausted fields with virgin soil at home went with his slaves either west or south, and hacked down enough of the primeval forest to give his working force its quantum of arable land. We need not stop here to tell of rice and cane, nor of other crops and industries which for a while engaged slave labor in northern regions of the south where the soil did not suit tobacco. The foregoing suggests adequately for this place how slavery became general in the south. The second fact is that the prevalent opinion of that time was far different from that of to-day, for certain reasons, to which I would now have you attend. Long before the discovery of America personal slavery had fallen under the ban of the christian church and become in Europe a thing of the past. The Divine Comedy catalogues in detail the religious, political, moral, and social events of its age. It is utterly silent throughout as to slavery. Dante died in 1321, soon after he had finished the Divine Comedy. That was nearly three hundred years before the appearance of African slavery in Virginia.