In the same year, cultivation was arrested, and the crops greatly reduced, by drought.
About the same time, the yellow fever prevailed with fearful mortality.
The next year the drought returned, and brooded in terror from March until January, and from January until June: not only blasting the harvest of '36, but extending its blight over the crops of '37.
Nothing could be better calculated to try the confidence in the new system.

Yet we find all classes zealously exonerating emancipation, and in despite of tornado, plague, and wasting, still affirming the blessings and advantages of freedom! SEVENTH PROPOSITION .-- _Free labor_ is decidedly LESS EXPENSIVE than _slave labor_.

It costs the planter actually less to pay his free laborers daily wages, than it did to maintain his slaves.

It will be observed in the testimony which follows, that there is some difference of opinion as to the _precise amount_ of reduction in the expenses, which is owing to the various modes of management on different estates, and more particularly, to the fact that some estates raise all their provisions, while others raise none.

But as to the fact itself, there can scarcely be said to be any dispute among the planters.