for the same. If we compare the ordinary allowance of food given to slaves per month—as, for instance, sixteen pounds pork, one bushel corn meal, and, say one quart of molasses on an average, and a half pint of salt—with that which it is shown by this table the free labourer is usually able to obtain by a month's labour, we can estimate the comparative general comfort of each.
I am not all disposed to neglect the allegation that there is sometimes great suffering among our free labourers. Our system is by no means perfect; no one thinks it so: no one objects to its imperfections being pointed out. There was no subject so much discussed in New York that winter as the causes, political and social, which rendered us liable to have labourers, under the worst possible combination of circumstances, liable to difficulty in procuring satisfactory food.
But this difficulty, as a serious thing, is a very rare and exceptional one (I speak of the whole of the Free States): that it is so, and that our labourers are ordinarily better fed and clothed than the slaves, is evident from their demands and expectations, when they are deemed to be suffering. When any real suffering does occur, it is mainly a consequence and a punishment of their own carelessness and improvidence, and is in the nature of a remedy.
And in every respect, for the labourer, the competitive system, in its present lawless and uncertain state, is far preferable to the slave system; and any labourer, even if he were a mere sensualist and materialist, would be a fool to wish himself a slave.
One New York newspaper, having a very large circulation at the South, but a still larger at the North, in discussing this matter, last winter, fearlessly and distinctly declared—as if its readers were expected to accept the truth of the assertion at once, and without argument—that the only sufficient
