SOUTHERN PROGRESS, CURRENCY, EXCHANGES, AND BANKS. 41

cents, in the latter part of summer, and soon after declines to eight cents; another time from fifteen to ten cents, and last year from sixteen, very suddenly, to nine, and subsequently, about Christmas, to eight, and prices only revived again by crops being withheld from sale. Buyers, whether foreign manufacturers, agents, or others, generally continue the depression when practicable, till the greater part of the crop be disposed of by the producers, when a competition ensues between speculators and manufacturers, with the latter aiming to keep the raw material of their manufacture perpetually depressed in value. At a less compensation for labor than is paid for American imports, the present exports of the South would exceed in relative or intrinsic value, two hundred millions of dollars; the one-third of this stricken off in consequence of a temporary premature supply being forced on the market of sale, amounts to upwards of sixty-six millions of dollars. This annual item of the South's avoidable loss, is worthy the attention of the Convention. By the members resolving (and performing) to perseveringly agitate the subject among their several constituencies, the latter will be induced some future first of May to liquidate their running accounts of the previous four months with stipulating to pay that amount at the time impliedly agreed on; and also stipulate, that running accounts, after such liquidation, and all subsequent time, contracts shall not become payable previous to the ensuing first of May. The merchants will cheerfully accede to such an arrangement; not only because they can as well arrange their purchase and payments accordingly, but also because their convenience and interests will be promoted; inasmuch as, by their customers realizing more value for their exports on an average than otherwise, they will be the better enabled to purchase more in quantity of consumable commodities both for cash and on time, and to meet their engagements often before maturity, and generally more than promptly otherwise.

Another topic on the third division is that of banks, and this necessarily includes currency; and this being the moving power of the vast machinery organized, by which relative values are changed, and the earnings of industry of all commercial nations made tributary to the foreign millionary and trafficking managers, and to others incidently participating, your attention is specially required to investigate its operations.

Human labor is the standard of commercial value. National coin, by containing within itself the quantity of human labor required to produce it, is the measure of value of any other commodity containing within itself a like quantity of labor to

produce it; and an exchange of one for the other is equitable, so far as labor value is concerned. When mere means, containing a certain quantity of labor, be used to procure anything containing a less quantity of labor, such exchanges are said to be made according to their relative value, or relative quantity of each, or to the supply and demand of either.

The estimated quantity of gold obtainable in a month on an average, by one engaged in washing it from sands or extracting it from ores, was directed by the American Congress to be coined in one piece as a measure of value, and to be called an eagle. This, at twenty-five working days to the month, with some allowance for bad weather, sickness, holydays, &c., apportioned forty cents per day of our currency, as compensation to gold diggers for their services.

From time immemorial, European nations estimated the labor in producing the same weight of materials for coin to be worth about thirty-six cents per day of their labor, and in their currency under a different name. Hence, the sterling or sovereign of England rates in the United States at $480, and in England at $4 44 of our currency.

Whether the variation of the rates of value of labor in the two countries was made to facilitate the organization of a decimal currency, (which, by the by, however good in itself, has always proved discordant and cumbersome when applied to the retained octave subdivisions of weights and measures, which also should have been, and ought to be made decimal,) or whether it proceeded from the intention of influencing the importation and retention of a greater quantity of gold for circulation, which was counteracted by the other nations appropriating the difference in premiums to themselves, the addition of the four cents, as extra compensation to gold diggers, would result in a great loss to the exporting States by the nine per cent. difference being added to the invoice cost of the imports that are received as payments for the exports, unless recounteracted by alloys in American coin.

As an illustration of how intrinsic can be changed into relative value, and they operate to transfer the earnings of one people to another without an adequate equivalent, we need only to partially examine the course of trade between England and the United States, and they with each other.

When Sir Robert Peel administered the government of England, he, for numerous reasons of State policy, induced the wealthy class to consent to measures that would tend to cause surplus money to be loaned abroad instead of at home; and as one to confine the Bank of England issues to the amount of specie on hand and to the amount of some government stocks, for which, by a sale of it, specie could at any

SOUTHERN PROGRESS, CURRENCY, EXCHANGES, AND BANKS. 43

be substituted; and as another, that no more bank charters should be granted nor any renewed, and those in existence restricted in their issues to not much over their coin on hand; and as another, that money should generally bear a very low rate of interest, which now is about two to two and a half per cent. for loans on call and on stock security.

In order to obtain interest, or a higher interest, on their money, as well as to accomplish the ends intended, loans have been freely made in the countries with which England traded. To this end, and for the purpose of controlling values of what the English traders sell and buy, a majority of the stock in bank charters, in all the principal places of trade in the United States and elsewhere, were bought up.

The borrowing, non-producing, trafficking, and speculating class, in other countries than England, were thus supplied with means of speculating, and of buying and consuming foreign goods, which only the producers of the exports had the means of buying or exchanging their productions for before. In consequence of this money-lending from abroad, through the agency of banks-on pledges of property of either principals or securities, purchases of State stocks, railroad bonds, &c., from the expenditure of which wages were given to employers, &c.-two sets of purchasers, the producing and non-producing, with two supplies of means, were placed in competition to purchase the one supply of foreign commodities, which proportionately diminished the values of the money of both; or, in traffickers' lingo, raised the price of foreign commodities.

On the other hand, by the English circulating no more money at home than is needed as a medium, by which to exchange an average day's work in gold digging for an average day's work in cotton, tobacco, naval stores producing, or for the same quantity of labor in productions of any other kind wanted for consumption, they necessarily sell at a comparatively low price.

The English money lenders, by receiving their interest from abroad, and not lending their money to idlers and speculators on other's industry at home, added to their own and to their communities' advantage in the saving of expenses by buying the productions of other nations, lower in consequence, to a much larger sum than the interest received from them amounted to; and by lending their money abroad, they enhanced the value of their communities' exportable productions to much more than the loaned money amounted to.

By lending money to the Americans, and multiplying it many folds with bank paper, the English obtain the products. of a large quantity of American labor for the products of a

small quantity of their labor-the actual or real money, (coin,) and much more repeatedly, returns to the English community in the shape of profits on trade, and a portion of it is re-lent from time to time, both to keep up the price of their productions in the American market of a multiplied paper currency, and prevent it being used at home to raise prices of American productions, which, in consequence, are sold, according to their relative value, with the small quantity of specie applied to purchase them at the rate of the consumptive demand.

American legislators are very zealous in promoting Sir Robert Peel's English policy, by annually chartering paper currency, issuing and loaning establishments, which lately numbered fourteen hundred in the United States, whose issues were estimated last year to be about six hundred millions of dollars, and acting as a substitute for fifty-eight millions of coin withheld from circulation.

The American Southern States are remarkably favorable to Sir Robert Peel's movement, by their not only supplying the English, and others, with from one hundred and fifty to two hundred millions of dollars value of toilsome earned exports, according to their low rates of value, in a currency restricted to specie abroad, but also find the money, such as it is, and consisting of evidences of individual debts, in note-swapping, for others to buy their own produce with. And this leads to a much greater mark of favor, both to the European and Northern States, by leaving the coin that they should receive for their produce at the North, to form a basis of issues of the free banks, and thus further sink the value of the South's labor and productions; or, which is the same thing, the coin value at which the product of the labor was estimated.

The Northern States import, for their consumption, a hundred millions of dollars, at their own expanded paper currency valuation, worth of foreign goods more than-at a specie rate of consumptive demand abroad-they have exports to pay for. The Southern States export abroad, say, a hundred millions of dollars more than they import, which balances the account, so far as it goes, between all the States with foreign nations. For the amount paid for the North abroad by the South, out of its produce at a low rate of value, in a currency restricted in its use to the exchanges of our labor value for another of equal labor value, the North sells to the South foreign and Northern goods, estimated to be worth, in the relative quantities of currency and commodities prevailing, a like sum of one hundred millions of dollars, which balances accounts between the North and South; but which quantity of foreign and Northern goods, in the absence of the artificial values. which the South contributes to-by not taking the specie

SOUTHERN PROGRESS, CURRENCY, EXCHANGES, AND BANKS. 45

home that she is entitled to from the sale of her productswould not be estimated at a third of the amount; which is another sixty-six million of dollars of annual loss, occasioned chiefly by the South's using a paper currency, not being a substitute for coin to the same amount being withdrawn and withheld from circulation in its stead.

From the causes above alluded to-and some others very prominent, which Southern legislation is the origin of—it may be perceived by what artifices fleets of empty ships annually enter Southern ports to convey away thousands of cargoes of the most valuable agricultural and other productions, with leaving nothing in return, or, as a consideration, but the ballast salt of the ships and some orders on consumers of foreign goods in other places, to pay for the latter in supplying the South with the necessary commodities, or means of continuing production.

This disastrous course of trade to the Southern States, proceeds from their and other States grossly violating the Constitution, in substituting a prohibited in lieu of an established currency. Being that there is no dependence on the non-producing class of law-makers in legislatures to retrace their steps, there appears to be no remedy or relief for the South, whether in or out of the Union, except through the present (not a future, Seward) Supreme Court. A case might be brought before it in this way: say an executor of an estate, or an assignee of an insolvent, should refuse to pay a claim on them from a bank, on the ground that the claim is founded in a swapping of notes-that is, that the plaintiff exchanged his circulating currency notes for defendant's larger note of hand-and the bank sues to recover, the court could not otherwise decide than that the transaction was illegal and void, because circulating notes were bills of credit, as defined by lexicographers, which the Constitution prohibits with such a decision, ninety-nine in every hundred of the banks would shut up shop, as they have nothing to lend but their own manufacture of currency notes, which, then, nobody would

borrow or receive.

ART. IV. DR. CARTWRIGHT ON THE CAUCASIANS AND THE

AFRICANS.

SEVERAL years ago we published some original and ingenious views of Dr. Cartwright, of New Orleans, upon the subject of negroes and their characteristics. The matter is more elaborately treated by him in the following paper:

The Nilotic monuments furnish numerous portraits of the negro races, represented as slaves, sixteen hundred years before the Christian era. Although repeatedly drawn from