Thus,
as a question of the annual yield of capital, that of New York was 34
per cent., and Virginia 15 per cent.; the annual product of capital
being more than double in New York what it was in Virginia. The problem
then is solved in Virginia, as it was in Maryland and South Carolina,
and all the South compared with all the North, that slavery retards the
progress of wealth and accumulation of capital in the ratio of 2 to 1.
Our war taxes may be very great, but the tax of slavery is far greater,
and the relief from it, in a few years, will add much more to the
national wealth than the whole deduction made by the war debt. Our total
wealth, by the Census of 1860, being, by Table 35, $16,159,616,068, one
per cent. taken annually to pay the interest and gradually extinguish
the war debt, would be $161,596,160; whereas, judging by Virginia and
New York, the diminished increase of the annual product of capital, as
the result of slavery, is 2.10 per cent., or $453,469,250 per annum,
equal in a decade, without compounding the annual results, to
$4,534,692,500.
That our population would have reached in 1860 nearly 40,000,000, and
our wealth have been more than doubled, if slavery had been extinguished
in 1790, is one of the revelations made by the Census; while in science,
in education, and national power, the advance would have been still more
rapid, and the moral force of our example and success would have
controlled for the benefit of mankind the institutions of the world.
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