The only words that Avarice could utter, The god Desire stood before their eyes— All wishes, prayers and wants; Said he to the two sisters: "Beauteous ladies, To be the slave of your behest; Choose therefore at your own sweet will and pleasure, Or in one word whatever you'd like best. Who speaks the first her prayer shall certainly At this proposal, all so frank and fair, Were mutually troubled! Misers and enviers, of our human race, Say, what would you have done in such a case? "What boots it, oh Desire, to me to have Crowns, treasures, all the goods that heart can crave, Or power divine bestow, Since still another must have always more !" So each, lest she should speak before Till the god lost all patience, held her tongue. He was enraged, in such a way With two such beauties in the public road; He wished them heartily both at the d—l. Envy at last the silence broke, And smiling with malignant sneer Upon her sister dear, Who stood in eager expectation by, Ever implacable and cruel, spoke : "I will be blinded of one eye !?? THE RE-ANNEXATION OF TEXAS: IN ITS INFLUENCE ON THE DURATION OF SLAVERY. ONE of the arguments in favor of reannexing Texas, which was well represented by Mr. Walker in his letter, seems to have been overlooked in the more recent discussions of the question. Even Mr. Calhoun seems to suppose that the peculiar institutions of the South, as it is the fashion to call slavery, are to be rendered more durable by the annexation; and the Abolitionists, as well as some of the more rational opponents of those institutions, object to the annexation on the same ground. Both are wrong, absolutely wrong, and a little attention to facts will prove the error. So far from perpetuating slavery in the United States, the annexation of Texas, or of the slave-holding portion of it at least, gives the only wellgrounded hope, according to all present appearances, for its ultimate extinction. This may appear to be a paradox; but it is sober truth, and fully susceptible of demonstration. Let us reason coolly and candidly about this matter, without regard to the opposite fanaticisms which rage on both sides of it. Every one who has either read or thought on the subject is aware that the value of a slave's labor is never equal to that of a freeman, and that the expense of his support is greater. He has less inducement to work hard, for he gains nothing by it; he has no inducement to be thrifty, for it saves him nothing. He gets his food and his clothing, whatever may be the crop or the expenses of making it; and in any event he gets nothing else. He is therefore an unthrift, as all are who live from hand to mouth; and he only differs from other unthrifts in this, that he has no inducements to reform. He is unskilful, too: he learns nothing: he has no occasion to think. Whether he plough deep or shallow, it is all one to him. Besides, where slaves are, white men will not work. Labor is degraded there, and the white freeman is glad to excuse his natural laziness by refusing to wear what he calls the badge of servitude. The consequence of this is, that a Yankee farmer with his sons will live and grow rich upon the corner of a farm, from which a Virginia planter with his slaves has just been driven a bankrupt. The Yankee works himself, his son works at his side, his wife and daughters are at work in the dairy or the kitchen. They all save, for it is their own. They study to increase the products of the farm and to improve the farm itself, for it is their wealth or to be their inheritance. Go down into old Fairfax in Virginia, just beyond the Potomac, the neighborhood of General Washington, formerly the garden of the South. Ten years ago it was almost a wilderness like Actæon devoured by his own dogs, the planters had been eaten up by their slaves. First, came mortgages on the proud old homestead; then mortgages on the slaves to raise money to feed them; at last the Sheriff: and the oldfashioned Virginia gentleman who used to import his pipe of wine a year and drive his blood horses to the Springs, has become a julap drinker at the stage house, or has struck out into the world to seek his fortune. But the land was too good to be lost. The Yankee has bought it. He has put up the fences, and driven his plough to the deeper soil, and turned in the clover; and old Fairfax is beginning to smile like a colony of New England. We have moved one step forward in our argument; for we are agreed now that a freeman can support himself by agricultural labor where a slave cannot. But there is another thing to be considered, and that is skill. Now and then, you will find in the South a smart negro, who has learned a trade. Now and then, not often,-for trades are not to be learned without attention, and few will give much attention to that which is not to repay them for their trouble. A skilful slave is worth more to his master; but he is worth no more to himself. If he even makes himself a master workman, he gets no wages; and if he is the veriest botch, he still gets his two suits of clothes, his corn ,meal, and his bacon. The slave mechanics are the.efore few and not expert. The great mass of the slaves in all countries has always been, and always must be, employed in mere labor, the commonest labor of the plantation. Taken as a body, they cannot support themselves by any other agricultural occupations. Now, agricultural employments require more ground than any other. A shoemaker can make his living on six feet square, a place just big enough for his bed and his bench. A thousand men can work in a single manufactory. People who live by their wits, thank Heaven, are not expected to be great landholders. Freemen then can be stowed closer and make a living, than slaves can. The traders, manufacturers, mechanics, professional men, may be crowded into towns, so that a hundred thousand shall live comfortably on a square mile of land. The slave must be a farmer, or rather a farmer's laborer, and a lazy, unskilful and wasteful laborer to boot, who makes small crops, and requires therefore much land to raise enough to clothe and feed him. Remembering this, as a second fact about which we are not to have any further argument, let us go on to another topic. In new countries, where land is cheap, agriculture is careless. That is to say, the farmer picks out the best soil and neglects the worse, and works over the best somewhat roughly. When an acre of new land can be bought for a dollar and a quarter, people are not apt to pay much for manuring an old one. In a new country, therefore, population is apt to be scattered, only the best soils cultivated, and those cropped hard, so as to make the most out of them for the time. When they are exhausted, the settler moves on to another tract. But as the country grows older, land becomes more costly. People learn the art of living on smaller farms. The farmer tries to improve what he has got, and to make it yield all that the best culture can bring out. Population thickens, and at last the country becomes so full, and land so dear, that it is difficult to obtain a living by mere labor. Then it is that emigration begins, and the surplus population, incapable of finding a support at home, moves away to regions where land is cheaper. Now, if ever such a time shall come to the slave States, it is very certain that the slaves, instead of being valuable property to their masters, will become an incumbrance. Whenever a man eats more than he earns, he must be dependent for support on the earnings of others; and in the case of the slave, the dependence must be on the master, for no one else is bound to support him. Let this state of things come about, and there will be no objections to abolition, at least on the part of the masters. And this state of things must and will come, as surely as men continue to eat and drink. The only question isWhen? When will the land of the slave States be so fully covered with population as to crowd out the slave? Let us see if we can answer this question. There are parts of Europe which we know to be fully stocked with population, where mere labor scarcely earns a living, but relies in part on the poorrates, and where government is willing to pay and does pay passage money for emigrants to America, in order to relieve itself of the burden of supporting them at home. In the more fertile part of the content of Europe, the population at presen time averages 110 persons for every square mile, or one for every six acres in the northern regions it is much less. Not that every square mile can do this. One may be a swamp, another a coal field, hundreds of others covered with the waters of rivers, lakes and inland seas, but on the whole, taking the good with the bad, the productive with the impracticable, the city pavement and the turnpike road, and the woodland with the arable farm, in the long average, six acres of land in the west of Europe, are barely sufficient to raise food for a human being. Beyond this, with the strictest economy, and highest skill, and most unflinching industry, European lands have not gone. Indeed, long before the population reaches this point, voluntary emigration begins with those who have the means; and when the point is fully reached, the guardians of the poor are busy freighting ships to carry off their paupers. But all these Europeans do not live by agriculture. One half at least, so the books say, live in the cities and towns, in London with its millions, in Paris, Vienna, &c., where tradesmen can flourish without occupying their shares of the land. Not so our American slaves; they, as we have seen, must live in the country, and use up their full proportion of the soil. And hence as we know, there are no large towns in the slave States, except such as are supported by commerce with abroad. More than fifteen sixteenths of all the inhabitants of those States, as shown by the last census, live on farms. Remember now that the slave, whatever his employment, produces less and wastes more than the freeman, and add to it the fact that from the nature of his only occupation, he requires more land, and it will be easy to see that if six acres, on the average, are required to support a freeman, who works for himself, a good deal more will be necessary to make food for a human being under the ignorant, lazy, and thriftless culture of a slave. It has been said, and with apparent truth, that from thirty-five to forty in the square mile, is about as large a population as slave labor can support. The villeins of England began to be freed when the population attained this rate, many hundred years ago. Delaware, where slavery is nearly worn out, the entire number of its slaves being but 2,600, has an average of little over thirty-five;-and those parts of Maryland and Virginia, which have approached this average, find slave labor unproductive, and scarcely more than adequate to its own support. Here, then, we have the two extremes. Slavery begins to be a bad business for the master when the country becomes so thickly settled that on the average 40 people are living on a square mile of land; and when the average reaches 110, mere labor, whether bond or free, is unable to support itself, but is forced to rely in whole or in part on the skill and charity of others. When will these numbers be reached in our Southern States ?-It is a mere question of arithmetic, and an easy one. We know what the population of the Slave States was in 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, 1830 and 1840, and can easily calculate the rate of its increase. This rate has varied somewhat; sometimes rising as high as 33 per cent. for a period of ten years; sometimes sinking to about 25, when causes happened to encourage emigration more than usual. The average has been about 30 per cent.-that is to say, at the end of every ten years 130 inhabitants have been found where 100 used to be. Thus in 1790 the slave population was about two millions: in 1800 about two millions six hundred thousand in 1810 something less than three millions and a half: in 1820 four millions and a half: in 1830 five millions and three quarters: and in 1840, a little over seven millions and a third. If the population shall continue to increase in the Southern States, as it has done thus far, it will have reached twentyfive millions by the year 1887, and about the year 1926 will not be less than seventy millions. So far is plain enough. There is no mistake in the calculation, nor in the facts on which it rests. Examine them as we may, the result is as we have just stated it:-in 1887, twenty-five millions-in 1926, seventy millions. Now mark the conclusion. The entire area of the present Slave States and Slave Territories, counting in Delaware, the District of Columbia, and the Floridas, is a little less than 630,000 square miles. A population of twenty-five millions on this area, such as will be on it in 1887, gives 40 persons to the square mile; a population of 70 millions, such as it will have in 1926, an average to the square mile of 110. It is a startling fact, but we cannot escape from it. In 1887, 43 years from the time at which we are writing, the average value of a slave's labor throughout the South will be little more than adequate to his support; in 1926, less than 82 years, it will be impossible for slavery to subsist except as a burthen on the master. The politician who fancifully imagines that a freeman is more apt to be fond of liberty if cradled in a land of slaves, may mourn over so early a downfall of his cherished institution; and the abolitionist may perhaps doubt, whether it is worth while to work so hard as he is doing, in the vain imagination of hastening what must necessarily come 80 soon. But there is the fact for them to ponder on; those are now living who will see the last of negro slavery in the United States. But, when this time shall have come, what is to be the lot of the negroes? In 1887, when their value has become questionable, they will number eight and a half millions: by the year 1926, the period before which the emancipation must take place, they will equal twenty-four millions of souls. What is to be done in the next forty-three years with these eight millions and a half of unproductive laborers; what in the next eighty-two, with these twentyfour millions of paupers? Here arithmetic fails. Shall they be emancipated on the soil that bred them? They will cover it with pauperism, with rapine and desolation. Their masters, impoverished by the depreciation and ultimate destruction of their property, with plantations encumbered and incapable of profitable culture,-how are they to support in the poor house or by parochial relief those who before constituted their wealth? Shall they be retained in bondage? The slaves of bankrupt masters, valueless themselves! It is only to levy in a different form an insupportable tax for pauperism on those who themselves are paupers. Shall they be invited to migrate to the North and West? Ohio has already closed her door against them by laws making it penal to introduce a free negro without indemnifying the State against the risk of his becoming a pauper. Pennsylvania has amended her Constitution so as to preclude the possibility of any but a white man becoming a citizen. In the Eastern and more Northern States, and in Canada, where this philanthropy is most rife, the negro cannot live; the climate destroys him. In Massachusetts, though the negro and the white man are equally freemen and citizens there, of threequarters of a million of inhabitants but eight thousand are negroes. What, then, is to be the fate of the negro of our Southern States? Remain as he is, he cannot. His condition must change-but what is the change to be? Where is he to gowhat to be his condition? Three-fourths of a century, and the question will have been decided, for good or for evil. Nor can we blind ourselves to its consequences, either to our Southern brethren or to the Union,-to the white man or to the negro. But is there no escape from the evils that impend upon the emancipation of the Southern slaves? Is this great moral good to be purchased only by horrors at which humanity sickens? Let him that believes in the watchfulness of Providence, or its wisdom, or its power, tremble in view of the calamities that are before us; a community ruined and hopeless,-a servile war, with its bloody hearthstones and desecrated altars,-a desolated empire. But to those who have faithfully marked the dispensations of The Most High, no crisis, present or prospective, can bring despair. The Republic of Texas, that now sues for admission into the American Union, skirts on the one side the southern line of the United States, and on the other stretches along the expanded frontier of Mexico. The climate of this last named country is the most favorable of the whole globe for the development of the negro race; more uniformly mild than the North or West, more salubrious than Africa, and with a soil spontaneously productive. There, and in Central America, and in the vast regions still further south, the negro is already a freeman,-socially as well as politically, the equal of the white. Nine-tenths of the population there is made up of the colored races ;-the Generals, the Congress-men, the Presidents, are men of mixed blood. Let the emancipated negro find himself on the borders of Mexico and the States beyond, and his fate is no longer doubtful or gloomy. He is near the land of his fellows, where equal rights and equal hopes await him and his offspring. Nor does it require the mysterious foresight of a prophet, to mark out the very steps by which he is to arrive there. The negro is less valuable as a laborer in the North than in the South he exults in the sunshine of the tropics, and shrinks before the bracing winters of a more temperate latitude. The slave, too, is less valuable as he approaches the confines of a free State. Exaggerating the happiness of that indolence which he regards as the characteristic of liberty, and aware of the possibility of escape into a country where slavery does not exist, he becomes discontented, reluctant, insubordinate. Besides he is there in almost immediate competition with the i |