Now a brief explanation of the antagonism between free and slave labor. The expense of his slaves to the farmer is the same whether they are resting or at work. Sundays, days and even seasons of unfavorable weather, in long do-nothing intervals succeeding the making and also the gathering of the crop, they cost him just as much as when he can work them from sun to sun. But this is not all of his load. The year round he must subsist the numerous non-workers in the families of his laborers, whether young, superannuated, or afflicted. Suppose another farmer to be on adjoining land who can employ laborers just as he wants them, and discharge them as soon as he has no further use for them. Do you not perceive that this free-labor farmer can produce far more cheaply than the slave farmer? And do you not also perceive that if there is a supply of free labor to be had in a slave country, and it can be got by every farmer _ad libitum_, slaves must lose their value as property and be driven to the wall? Free labor was kept out of the south by the repugnance of the white laborer to the negro. Note also that when the number of slaves had become considerable their owners would naturally combine to protect the market value of their property by preventing the coming in of cheaper labor. This was the real reason why Virginia and Delaware opposed the extension of the African slave-trade from 1800 to 1808, and the Confederate States' constitution refused to reopen it. Slavery made some headway in the north. But not finding there the stimulus of such products as tobacco and cotton, it could not become so widespread and deep-seated as to sweep out free labor. The latter under favorable conditions commenced the competition in which it could not fail to win; and in due time slavery died out in the north. We especially desire to emphasize the attitude towards extension of slavery that free labor was bound to take. That it had already ejected slavery from every other enlightened community will occur to the reader at once as weighty proof that the two cannot live together.[23] Think of the free worker's suffrage, and you cannot believe that he could long be induced to vote for the protection and further spread of a system taking the bread out of his own mouth, and degrading him by engendering profound disrespect for his class; and then think of the vast and rapidly growing numbers of the free laborers of the north, receiving every day great accessions of foreign immigrants avoiding the south as they would the plague; think of all these, and you begin to discern what a mighty power was rising against slavery.