When he incorporated this provision in his draft of the ordinance, Jefferson was but little in advance of the opinion of the day on the effects of employing slave labour. Never until its death was the system so near dissolution as in the organising days between the birth of the republic and the invention of the cotton-gin. State after State in forming its constitution, or by special enactment, arranged for immediate abolition or gradual emancipation. Even in slaveholding Virginia and North Carolina, few could be found to defend the system from an economic standpoint, although they had to admit the necessity of its use in the rice swamps of South Carolina and Georgia. Lafayette was urging Washington to employ his recently acquired leisure in transforming slaves into free tenants. "Such an example as yours," he wrote from Cadiz, "might render it a general practice." "Would to God a like spirit might diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country," replied the Virginia farmer, "but I despair of seeing it. To set the slaves afloat at once would, I really believe, be productive of much inconvenience and mischief, but by degrees it certainly might and assuredly ought to be effected; and that too by legislative authority." At the same time he put himself on record as determined never to add another to the number of his slaves by purchase. A petition for emancipation had just been introduced into the Virginia House of Delegates and was "rejected without dissent; but not without an avowed patronage of its principles by sundry respectable members," as Madison informed Washington. "A motion was made to throw it under the table, which was treated with as much indignation on one side as the petition itself was on the other." Jefferson had been disappointed at an earlier time because no emancipation provision had been incorporated in the Constitution of Virginia. "What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!" he wrote in this connection, "who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself in vindication of his own liberty and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro' his trial and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose." An interesting commentary on the industrial progress of the country is afforded by comparing these early views of Southern statesmen upon the slavery system with those held by a later generation.