It behooves us not
only to meet the expenditure promptly, but to make the investment pay.
We have but to increase the annual product of the country six and
one-half per cent, and we shall meet the tax for expenses, interest,
and sinking-fund, and be as well off as we now are, provided the tax be
equitably assessed.
This increase can be made without any increase in the number of
laborers, by securing a larger return from those now employed, and by
the permanent occupation of the fertile soil of the South by a large
portion of the Union army, as settlers and cultivators, who have
heretofore spent their energies upon the comparatively unproductive
soil of the North.
Slavery is the one obstacle to be removed in order to render this war a
paying operation.
Under the false pretence that the climate of the South is too hot for
white men to labor in the fields, the degradation involved in
field-labor in a Slave State excludes intelligent cultivators from the
cotton-fields, a very large portion of which have a climate less hot
and less unsuitable for white men than that of Philadelphia, while
there is not a river-bottom in the whole South in which the extremes of
heat during the summer are so great as in St.
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