was Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian, and the title of his book was The Impending Crisis in the South. Mr. Helper was a poor white who had educated himself; his point of view was that of the Southerner who did not own slaves.

The Impending Crisis is crammed with figures, and arguments based on statistics. It is an economic study of the effect of slavery on the Southern states in general, and on the nonslave-owning white man in particular. His theme was that the Southern white man was being ruined by slavery. It was a literary work of intellectual power, entirely bare of sentimentalism, with every argument supported by facts.

Helper did not care anything at all for the negro; he was occupied wholly with the welfare of the white man, and he was convinced that white men, as a class, could not prosper as long as slavery continued to exist.

He held up to scorn the slave-owner's dictum that "Cotton is king," and proceeded to prove by census statistics that the hay produced in the North had a larger money value than the cotton crop, with tobacco, rice and several other Southern agricultural products thrown in. He points out that the hay crop of the free states in 1850 was worth $331,000,000— which was four times the value of all the cotton grown in the South.

That slavery, through its inefficiency, depreciated the value of everything it touched, was one of his chief arguments. To illustrate this point he showed that the real and personal property of New York state was worth more than all the property, including slaves, in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida and Texas.

His devastating analysis continued in a consideration of land values. Let us compare New Jersey and South Carolina, he said. In South Carolina the seventeen million acres of land assessed for taxation were valued at about twenty-three million dollars, or $1.32 an acre. In New Jersey, the five million acres assessed for taxation were worth more than one hundred

No Profit in Slavery

and fifty million dollars, or $28.76 an acre.

The reason

slavery... according to Mr. Helper. The cotton-planters of the South, he asserted, did not clear a net profit of as much as one per cent annually on their invested capital.

One would naturally think that such a book, backed by statistics, would have been considered a notable contribution to the economic literature of the day, but it was not looked upon in any such light in the slave states. Bonfires were made of it, and any man caught reading it was in danger of being mobbed. This truculent attitude was the result of Mr. Helper's conclusions rather than his statistics. He wrote that the nonslave-holding whites among the Southern people themselves ought to take the matter in hand, cast the slave-owning aristocrats from the seats of power and force them to pay, by means of special taxation, for the ruin they had brought upon the South.

The Impending Crisis had a huge circulation. Within three years about a million copies had been either sold or given away. The time-stained copy that I own was originally bought by an E. M. Davis, of 55 Bank Street (New York City, I presume), and he had presented it to some one else. On the fly-leaf Mr. Davis pasted a printed slip which throws some light on the vigor of the anti-slavery propaganda. Mr. Davis said on this slip:

I have bought 500 copies of The Impending Crisis in the South for gratuitous distribution. I can circulate judiciously ten times that number. If you are disposed to coöperate, be kind enough to send, without delay, the names, with post-office addresses, of any parties you would like the book sent to, and such amount of funds as you feel justified in contributing. If you hesitate to aid me, read the book anyway, and then write me afterwards. Promptness is of importance.

Public opinion in North Carolina-meaning the opinion of the oligarchy-was not in the least bit favorable to Mr.

Helper. His former neighbors were not impressed by the fact that The Impending Crisis was a "best-seller," or that Mr. Helper was the only North Carolinian in the history of the state who had ever written a book that had sold to the extent of a million copies. After his reverberating literary success, the North Carolinians did not put any wreaths on his head, but they threatened to put tar and feathers on his back if he ever returned to his native state.

The North, as well as the South, had its weak spots. We find Southern publicists harping on the long hours of labor in Northern factories, on the indigent poor, and on the homeless children that roamed in crowds through the streets and alleys of New York City.

The living conditions of the laboring people in some of the Northern cities was indeed deplorable. Of the homeless children in New York, Denis Tilden Lynch says in his "Boss" Tweed: "Harriet Beecher Stowe did not have to seek among the blacks for a Topsy. She could have found her in any one of the hundreds of little girls of six to ten years of age, who swept the crossings of the principal streets of New York. These children, in ragged dress and pinched face, broom in one hand, and the other extended, depended for their living on the chance coins bestowed on them by those whose boots were kept clean through their exertions."

There were more than ten thousand of these abandoned children in New York City alone. They grew up like wild animals. Their lairs were dry goods boxes and disused cellars. Compared with their hunted and starved lives the existence of a black slave child on a Southern plantation was a paradise.

H

ENRY WARD BEECHER held a slave auction in

his Brooklyn church, just to show his congregation what slave-trading actually was. He had managed to get possession of a lovely octoroon slave girl, with long golden hair flowing down her back. In all outward appearances she was as white or even whiter-than the crowd which jammed the church. The auction was a grotesque caricature of reality. Beautiful young slave women of this descriptionand there were very few of them in existence-were never auctioned off at all in the South. They became rich men's mistresses, wore Parisian clothes, and had carriages and servants of their own. The members of the church bid briskly for the girl. The auction was illegal, of course, in New York state, and was understood to be merely a dramatic entertainment. The girl was set free at once, and the money that was bid for her went to support the anti-slavery crusade.

Funds were raised by public subscription in the Northern states to send armed abolitionist settlers to Kansas. Emerson descended from his Nirvana of philosophic calm to say that "it is impossible to be a gentleman and not be an abolitionist." Garrison was no longer dragged about the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck. Highly respectable people invited him to their houses, and he became a popular hero.

The swelling fury of the North was fully met by the indignation of the South. Northern travelers in the Southern

latitudes were carefully watched, and some of them were searched to be sure that they were not laden with abolition pamphlets. Southern postmasters refused to deliver the New York Tribune to its subscribers. The papers came back scribbled over with invectives.

Robert Toombs, of Georgia, who was considered the leading Southern statesman of the time, made pro-slavery speeches which spluttered with such fiery anger that he got his words twisted. He declared that he "would rather see the whole country the cemetery of freedom than the habitation of slaves." He meant, of course, that the threatened invasion of states' rights would reduce the Southern white man to a negligible position in national affairs when he spoke of "habitation of slaves."

The abolitionists did not have everything their own way, by any means. In 1857 Chief Justice Taney, of the United States Supreme Court, handed down the celebrated Dred Scott Decision-a blow which dazed the anti-slavery party, and sent it reeling about the political arena.

Judge Taney and a majority of the associate justices ruled that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution." The court decided that the Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850-and every other legislative act which had for its object the restriction of slavery to geographical limits -were unconstitutional and void. Never before in the history of the United States had such a sweeping and cataclysmic decision come from its supreme tribunal.

It might seem, in the light of this momentous legal opinion, that the slavery party had won every point at issue; and that there were not to be any free states. It appeared that the only way to get rid of slavery-other than by the voluntary