Now look at the southern situation. At the outset, note that his slaves were the southerner's only laborers, and practically his only property. And note especially that this property was not only self-supporting, but it was also the most rapidly self-reproducing that Tom, Dick, and Harry ever had in all history. A reliable witness tells this: "On my father's plantation an aged negro woman could call together more than one hundred of her lineal descendants. I saw this old negro dance at the wedding of her great-granddaughter."[24] Let me repeat that slaves were not only money-making laborers, but also things of valuable property, which of themselves multiplied as dollars do at compound interest. Let the northern man unfamiliar with slavery try to understand this one of its phases by supposing that he has orchards abundantly yielding a fruit which is in good demand, and that the trees plant and tend themselves, gather and store the fruit, set out other orchards, and do all things else necessary to care for the property and keep it steadily growing. Such trees with their yearly produce and prodigious increase--each by an easy organic or natural, and not by a difficult artificial, process, relieving the owner from all but the slightest attention and labor of superintendence--would soon be the only ones in their entire zone of production; bringing it about that all other occupations and property therein would be dependent upon this main and really only industry. Such orchards would be somewhat like the slaves in their automatic production and accumulation, but they would be much inferior as marketable property in many particulars. Although the profits of slave-planting were considerable, the greatest profit of all was what the master thought of and talked of all the day long,--the natural increase of his slaves, as he called it. His negroes were far more to him than his land. His planting was the furthest removed of all from a proper restorative agriculture. Quickly exhausting his new cleared fields, he looked elsewhere for other virgin soil to wear out. The number of the slaves in the south was growing fast, and the new lands in the older slave States were nearly gone. To keep the hens laying the golden eggs of natural increase, nests must be found for them on the cotton, sugar, and rice lands of the Territories. In other words, the area of slave culture must be extended; for whenever there is no land for a considerable number of our workers, it is evident that we have a surplus of slaves; and the effect of that will be at the first to lower the market value of our only property, and then gradually to destroy it. So the instincts of the southerners whispered in their ears.