very small, compared with that done by the labourers of the Free States.
Of course, it does not follow that all articles produced by such labour cost four times as much as in New York. There are other elements of cost besides labour, as land and fuel. I could not have a bushel of lime or salt or coal dug for me on my farm at Staten Island at any price. There are farms in Virginia where either could be obtained by an hour's labour.
Yet now, as I think of all the homes of which I have had a glimpse, it does not seem to me that men who are reputed to be worth $400,000 have equal advantages of wealth here with those whose property is valued at a quarter that, in the Eastern Free States; men with $40,000 live not as well here, all things considered, as men worth $10,000 at the North; and the farmer who owns half a dozen negroes, and who I suppose must be called worth $4000, does not approach in his possession of civilized comfort, the well-to-do working man with us, who rents a small house, and whose property consists in its furniture, his tools, skill, and strength, and who has a few hundred dollars laid up in the Savings-Bank, against a rainy day. I do not need to ask a farmer, then, any longer why he lifts his stable door into its place, and fastens it by leaning a log against it, as he evidently has been doing for years. He cannot afford to buy or hire a blacksmith for his little farm, and what with going and coming, and paying in corn which must be carried a number of miles over scarcely passable roads, our thriftiest farmers would wait for better times, perhaps, before they would take half the trouble or give a third as much corn as the blacksmith will want for the job, to save a minute's time whenever they needed to enter and leave their stable. And so with everything. Any substantial work costs so much, not alone in money or corn
