[Footnote 16:  Ibid., p. 60.]

[Footnote 17:  Ibid., p. 83.]

[Footnote 18:  First American edition (New York, 1862), p. 73.]

The force of circumstances gave this book a prodigious and lasting vogue.  Its confident and cogent style made skepticism difficult; the dearth of contrary data prevented impeachment on the one side of the Atlantic, and on the other side the whole Northern people would hardly criticise such a vindication of their cause in war by a writer from whose remoteness might be presumed fairness, and whose professional position might be taken as giving a stamp of thoroughness and accuracy.  Yet the very conditions and method of the writer made his interpretations hazardous.  An economist, using great caution, might possibly have drawn the whole bulk of his data from travelers’ accounts, as Cairnes did, and still have reached fairly sound conclusions; but Cairnes gave preference not to the concrete observations of the travelers but to their generalizations, often biased or amateurish, and on them erected his own.  Furthermore, he ignored such material as would conflict with his preconceptions.  His conclusions, accordingly, are now true, now false, and while always vivid are seldom substantially illuminating.  His picture of the Southern non-slaveholders, which, be it observed, he applied in his first edition to five millions or ten-elevenths of that whole white population, and which he restricted, under stress of contemporary criticism, only to four million souls in the second edition,[19] is merely the most extreme of his grotesqueries.  The book was, in short, less an exposition than an exposure.

[Footnote 19:  Ibid., second edition (London, 1863), appendix D.]

These criticisms of Cairnes will apply in varying lesser degrees to all of his predecessors in the field.  Those who sought the truth merely were in general short of data; those who could get the facts in any fullness were too filled with partisan purpose.  What was begun as a study was continued as a dispute, necessarily endless so long as the political issue remained active.  Many data which would have been illuminating, such as plantation records and slave price quotations, were never systematically assembled; and the experience resulting from negro emancipation was then too slight for use in substantial generalizations.  The economist M’Culloch, for example, concluded from the experience of San Domingo and Jamaica that cane sugar production could not be sustained without slavery;[20] but the industrial careers of Cuba, Porto Rico and Louisiana since his time have refuted him.  He, like virtually all his contemporaries in economic thought, confused the several factors of slavery, race traits and the plantation system; the consequent liability to error was inevitable.

[Footnote 20:  J.R.  M’Culloch, Principles of Political Economy (fourth edition, Edinburgh, 1849), p. 439.]