comforts, or shops and machinery, and thus the cheap manufacture of comforts on the spot where they are demanded. But they who sell the reinforcement of slaves, and to whom comes the fifteen thousand dollars, do they have no increase of home comfort? Taking into consideration the gradual destruction of all the elements of home comfort which the rearing and holding of those slaves has occasioned in the district from which they are sold, it may be doubtful if, in the end, they do. Whither, then, does this capital go? The money comes to the country from those who buy cotton, and somebody must have a benefit of it. Who? Every one at the South says, when you ask this, it is the Northern merchant, who, in the end, gets it into his own hands, and it is only him and his whom it benefits. Mr. Gregg apparently believes this. He says, after the sentence last quoted from him, describing the transfer of capital to the West from South Carolina:—
"But this is not all. Let us look for a moment at the course of things
among our mercantile classes. We shall not have to go much further back
than twenty-five years to count up twenty-five millions of capital accumulated
in Charleston, and which has left us with its enterprising owners, who
have principally located in northern cities. This sum would build factories
enough to spin and weave every pound of cotton made in the State, besides
making railroads to intersect every portion of the up-country, giving business
facilities to the remotest points."
How comes this capital, the return made by the world
for the cotton of the South, to be so largely in the hands of
Northern men? The true answer is, that what these get is
simply their fair commercial remuneration for the trouble of
transporting cotton, transporting money, transporting the total
amount of home comfort, little as it is, which the South gets
for its cotton, from one part of the country to the other (chiefly
cotton to the coast, and goods returned instead of money from
the coast to the plantations), and for the enormous risks and
advances of capital which are required in dealing with the
