rude sanctimoniousness, a jealousy and hatred
of everything Southern, a dulness, and a—I do
not know what else.

When I went Boston way again, and innocently
asked the same question of the Northerner,
he said:

"The Southerns are lazy braggers, slave-holders,
and enemies of improvement; they have no
stamina; they let you English burn Washington
in the last war; they are bloodthirsty duellists,
but they have no endurance in fighting; they
are clever tall talkers, but they won't do much."

The Northern papers are always exulting
over the commercial wealth of the North, and
are yet, as the South asserts, always betraying a
jealousy of the natural advantages of the slave
states. The North has marble and iron, the
South is an unfading Eden; the energy is North,
the good land is South; the education is chiefly
North, yet the South asserts that all the best
genius and all the best eloquence spring up
without cultivation in the slave states, under
their fiercer climate and more careless life.

The Northern papers say the annual mineral
product of the North is, compared to the South,
as eighty-five millions of dollars to twelve millions
of dollars. The free states, with all their
frost, and snow, and meagre sun, are worth,
it is said, thirty-five hundred million dollars
more than the slave states. The monthly
sale of sweet milk alone in New York, Philadelphia,
and Boston, amounts to more than the
whole annual value of all the rosin, tar, pitch,
and turpentine, produced in the Southern States.
Every figure in these statistics pierces the
Southern men like a poisoned bullet. It galls
him to be told the truth, that the wharfs of Baltimore
and Richmond groan with piles of Northern
timber; that the clippers and steamers of Charleston
are built in the North; that the vehicles,
axe-helves, walking-canes, the very clothes-pins
and penholders of the South, come from the
North; that the great timber buildings and warehouses
of Savannah and Charleston are built
with Northern timber, while the Southern men
burn down their forests merely to clear the
ground for their cotton. The Northern hay
consumed in a single slave state, costs seven
millions and seventy-five thousand dollars a year.
The South gets her school-books from the
North and nearly all her clothing. Indeed,
only a day or two before I left America, I read
a speech delivered by a Mr. Paul Cameron
before an agricultural society in Orange
County, North Carolina, that acknowledged
much of this with bitter shame. The speaker (a
Southern man, mind), addressing Southern men,
said—and we see Helper has since seized it and
hurled it back at the South—"I know not
when I have been more humiliated, as a North
Carolina farmer, than a few weeks ago at a
railway depôt, at the very doors of our State
capital, seeing waggons drawn by Kentucky
mules loading with Northern hay, for the
supply not only of the towns, but also to be
taken into the country. Such a sight in the
capital of a State whose population is almost
exclusively agricultural, is a most humiliating
exhibition. Let us cease to use everything, as
far as it is practicable, that is not the product
of our own soil and workshops; not an axe, or
broom, or bucket, from Connecticut. By every
consideration of self-preservation we are called
on to make better efforts to expel the Northern
grocer from the State with his butter, and the
Ohio and Kentucky horse, mule, and hog driver
from our county at least. It is a reproach on
us farmers, and no little deduction from our
wealth, that we suffer all the populations of our
towns and villages to supply themselves with
butter from another Orange county in New York."

Here you see a Southerner, in the words
"Let us cease to use everything Northern,"
expressing the Southern dislike in a new form.

As for Helper, he goes to the extent of clearly
proving that, so far from the South being pre-eminent
in agriculture or agricultural wealth,
the hay crop alone of the free states is worth
more by three million dollars a year than all
the cotton, tobacco, rice, hay, hemp, and cane
sugar, annually produced in the fifteen slave
states. He says that one acre of land near
Baltimore will produce fifty dollars' worth of
hay a year, while in some parts of Carolina
the cotton is not worth more than twelve dollars
per acre. The slave state land is soon exhausted
by perpetual unmanured crops of the
same plant. Judging by the bushel measure,
that scorns to lie, the Northerners challenge the
South to refute the great fact that their fields
produce more a year by some seventeen million
bushels. The New York papers actually calculate
that the free states are worth at least some three
thousand five hundred millions of dollars more
than the slave states.

The South, too, is galled by the constant reflection
that, half a century ago, Virginia was
the Empire state; that once, Pennsylvania went
to Charleston to buy her drab cloths and lavender
silks; that the great man who helped to found
Lowell was driven out of Richmond by the
slaveholders; that Philadelphia city alone contains
a population greater than that of the
whole free population of Eastern Virginia. The
Southerners are taunted with the rapid and dangerous
increase of their negro population, and
by the progressive inroads of freedom.

You cannot, indeed, travel a mile in the South
without seeing some demonstration of the old
hatred. For days in Alabama I myself was
shunned because I was taken for a New Yorker.
The first feuilleton I read in a Southern paper
described the hero in a railway carriage, entering
into conversation with a fellow-passenger, and
falling into silence as soon as he found that he
was a Northerner.

Still, I hope that the majority of North and
South dread a war that must be bloody, fratricidal,
inhuman, and anti-Christian—that must be
terrible in its immediate consequences, and ruinous
in its ultimate results. It is easy to wound, but it
is slow to cure. Warehouses will be burnt, sea-ports
stopped, markets depressed. Firms will
drop into bankruptcy like beech-nuts on a windy