Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

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I have said that I believe that our country is now only a few years away from a similar great transformation. In order to maintain that thesis, it will be necessary to show, first, a great underlying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue; and second, a consequent movement of protest, slowly making headway and ultimately permeating the whole thought of the country.

What was the cause of the Civil War? To put it into a phrase, it was the need under which Slavery laboured of securing new territory. The reader may find a contemporary exposition of the situation in Olmstead’s “Cotton Kingdom.” Slave labour was a very wasteful means of cultivation—only the top of the soil was used, and ten or fifteen crops exhausted it. Virginia was once a great exporting state, but in the forties and fifties it had become simply a slave-breeding ground for the younger generation, which had moved to the Far South. And then, when the Far South began to prove insufficient, there was another move, into Texas; and finally an attempt at still a third, into Kansas—which brought on the clash with the free states.