That any respectable man--any man with a heart or a soul in his composition--can look upon these poor toiling white women without feeling indignant at that accursed system of slavery which has entailed on them the miseries of poverty, ignorance, and degradation, we shall not do ourself the violence to believe. If they and their husbands, and their sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters, are not righted in some of the more important particulars in which they have been wronged, the fault shall lie at other doors than our own. In their behalf, chiefly, have we written and compiled this work; and until our object shall have been accomplished, or until life shall have been extinguished, there shall be no abatement in our efforts to aid them in regaining the natural and inalienable prerogatives out of which they have been so infamously swindled. We want to see no more plowing, or hoeing, or raking, or grain-binding, by white women in the Southern States; employment in cotton-mills and other factories would be far more profitable and congenial to them, and this they shall have within a short period after slavery shall have been abolished. Too hot in the South for white men! What is the testimony of reliable Southrons themselves? Says Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky:-- "In the extreme South, at New Orleans, the laboring men--the stevedores and hackmen on the levee, where the heat is intensified by the proximity of the red brick buildings, are all white men, and they are in the full enjoyment of health. But how about Cotton? I am informed by a friend of mine--himself a slaveholder and therefore good authority--that in Northwestern Texas, among the German settlements, who true to their national instincts, will not employ the labor of a slave--they produce more cotton to the acre, and of a better quality, and selling at prices from a cent to a cent and a half a pound higher than that produced by slave labor." Says Gov. Hammond, of South Carolina:-- "The steady heat of our summers is not so prostrating as the short, but frequent and sudden, bursts of Northern summers." In an extract which may be found in our second chapter, and to which we respectfully refer the reader, it will be seen that this same South Carolinian, speaking of "not less than fifty thousand" non-slaveholding whites, says--"most of these now follow agricultural pursuits." Says Dr. Cartwright of New Orleans:-- "Here in New Orleans, the larger part of the drudgery--work requiring exposure to the sun, as railroad-making, street-paving, dray-driving, ditching and building, is performed by white people."