affairs of the whole country.  The northern manufacturers were intimately connected with this cotton trade, and more than two thirds raised in the United States has been sold in Great Britain; and it is this cotton trade that supports the whole system.  That you may rely upon.  The sugar and rice, so far as the United States are concerned, are but small interests.  The system is supported by this cotton trade, and within two days I have seen an article written with vigor in the Charleston Mercury, a southern paper of great influence, saying, that the slaveholders are becoming isolated, by the force of public opinion, from the rest of the world.  They are beginning to be regarded as inhuman tyrants, and the slaves the victims of their cruelty; but, says the writer, just so long as you take our cotton, we shall have our slaves.  Now, you are as really involved in this matter as we are—­[Hear, hear!]—­and if you have no other right to speak on the subject, you have a right to speak from being yourselves very active participators in the wrong.  You have a great deal of feeling on the subject, honorable and generous feeling, I know—­an earnest, philanthropic, Christian feeling; but if you have nothing to do, that feeling will all evaporate, and leave an apathy behind.  Now, here is something to be done.  It may be a small beginning, but, as you go forward, Providence will develop other plans, and the more you do, the further you will see.  I am happy to know that a beginning has been made.  There are indications that a way has been so opened in providence that this exigency can be met.  Within the last few years, the Chinese have begun to emigrate to the western parts of the United States.  They will maintain themselves on small wages; and wherever they come into actual competition with slave labor, it cannot compete with them.  Very many of the slaveholders have spoken of this as a very remarkable indication.  If slavery had been confined to the original slave states, as it was intended, slavery could not have lived.  It was the intention that it should never go beyond those boundaries.  Had this been the case, it would increase the number of slaves so much that they would have been valueless as articles of property.  I must say this for America, that the slaves increase in the slave states faster than the white people; and it shows that their physical condition is better than was that of the slaves at the West Indies, or in Cuba, where the number actually diminished.  We must have more slave territories to make our slaves valuable, and there was the origin of that iniquitous Mexican war, whereby was added the vast territory of Texas; and then it was the intention to make California a slave state; but, I am happy to say, it has been received into the Union as a free state, and God grant it may continue so. [Hear, hear!] What has been the effect of this expansion of slave territory?  It has doubled the value of slaves.  Since I can remember, a strong slave man would sell for about four