[66] _Revelations of a Slave Smuggler_, p. 98. [67] Mr. H. Moulton in _Slavery as it is_, p. 140; cited in _Facts and Observations on the Slave Trade_ (Friends' ed. 1841), p. 8. [68] In a memorial to Congress, 1840: _House Doc._, 26 Cong. 1 sess. VI. No. 211. [69] _British and Foreign State Papers_, 1845-6, pp. 883, 968, 989-90. The governor wrote in reply: "The United States, if properly served by their law officers in the Floridas, will not experience any difficulty in obtaining the requisite knowledge of these illegal transactions, which, I have reason to believe, were the subject of common notoriety in the neighbourhood where they occurred, and of boast on the part of those concerned in them": _British and Foreign State Papers_, 1845-6, p. 990. * * * * * _Chapter XI_ THE FINAL CRISIS. 1850-1870. 80. The Movement against the Slave-Trade Laws. 81. Commercial Conventions of 1855-56. 82. Commercial Conventions of 1857-58. 83. Commercial Convention of 1859. 84. Public Opinion in the South. 85. The Question in Congress. 86. Southern Policy in 1860. 87. Increase of the Slave-Trade from 1850 to 1860. 88. Notorious Infractions of the Laws. 89. Apathy of the Federal Government. 90. Attitude of the Southern Confederacy. 91. Attitude of the United States. 80. ~The Movement against the Slave-Trade Laws.~ It was not altogether a mistaken judgment that led the constitutional fathers to consider the slave-trade as the backbone of slavery. An economic system based on slave labor will find, sooner or later, that the demand for the cheapest slave labor cannot long be withstood. Once degrade the laborer so that he cannot assert his own rights, and there is but one limit below which his price cannot be reduced. That limit is not his physical well-being, for it may be, and in the Gulf States it was, cheaper to work him rapidly to death; the limit is simply the cost of procuring him and keeping him alive a profitable length of time. Only the moral sense of a community can keep helpless labor from sinking to this level; and when a community has once been debauched by slavery, its moral sense offers little resistance to economic demand. This was the case in the West Indies and Brazil; and although better moral stamina held the crisis back longer in the United States, yet even here the ethical standard of the South was not able to maintain itself against the demands of the cotton industry. When, after 1850, the price of slaves had risen to a monopoly height, the leaders of the plantation system, brought to the edge of bankruptcy by the crude and reckless farming necessary under a slave _regime_, and baffled, at least temporarily, in their quest of new rich land to exploit, began instinctively to feel that the only salvation of American slavery lay in the reopening of the African slave-trade.