Yet, in spite of these facts, a writer in the London _Saturday Review_ informs the English public that the rapid deterioration of the soil under slave labor is a popular fallacy! Could the gentleman who gives this information so glibly, examine, we do not say Virginia, but simply that lower county of Delaware which has adhered somewhat to the old Southern slave system, in contradistinction to its two sisters, he might have distinctly ascertained if the exhaustion of soil by slave labor be a fallacy. Again, if the profits of slavery be only for the master, it may be true that the same process which enriches him impoverishes the country at large; and this is really the case through all the South. Free labor shuns slave society: a few Northern men may here and there live in the South, but as a rule the negro makes the poor white meaner than himself. It is true that free white labor in new lands is very exhaustive--but in time it takes them up again and restores them: this the negro never does, and never can do. The tendencies of slavery to render the white man insolent, arrogant, and oligarchical, are well pointed out by Professor Cairnes, and with them the evil tendencies of slave societies. It makes bad white men, and intolerable political neighbors. In the ancient world, slaves were constantly being educated, freed, and made equal to their masters; but in the confederacy, everything is done to crush them lower and lower; and in these facts lie _perdu_ the future further degradation of every poor white in the South, the constant increase of power and capital in the hands of a few, and the diminution in number even of these few.