would have undergone an entire change. The blacks were then prospectively a burden; they are now an absolute necessity. They then threatened American civilisation; they are now its support. With multiplying numbers they have added to the national wealth. They have become the instruments of political agitation, while they have conferred wealth upon the masses. It is not the cotton alone that demands the slave labour, but sugar, tobacco and other interests require growing numbers of hands, for which there is no source of supply but natural increase. It is not, therefore, a matter of surprise that the blacks should be taken from the non-productive employments of the cities, and made to furnish the present profitable productions. The North exhibits a contrast to this, while the cities are overrun with poor who find no employment the West is destitute of hands for harvest. It is in vain that the papers preach to the "free labourers" the importance and benefit of farm labour. They cling to the cities, crowd tenement houses, and raise numbers of pauper children, which in New York, to some extent, are collected in benevolent institutions, sent West, and "bound out" to farmers for some years. Thus, on a small scale, goes on at the North what is found so generally necessary at the South.

But the South does not seek to force, or even intrude, their system on the North. They are excluded, justly, wisely, and contentedly from all political power and responsibility in your capital States. They are sovereigns on the subject of slavery within their own borders, as the North are on the same subject within their own borders. It is well and wisely so arranged. Use authority to maintain what system you please, they are not distrustful of the result. They have exercised theirs to protect and perfect the manhood of the members of the States. The whole sovereignty upon domestic concerns within the Union is divided between North and South by unmistakeable boundaries. North have fifteen distinct parts; the South eighteen parts, equally distinct. Each must be maintained in order that the whole may be preserved. If one shall be assailed, within or without, by any enemy, or for any cause, and should it need, all will expect both North and South to defend it. If one shall be assailed, in the emergency, no matter what the cause or the pretext, or who the foe, the South will defend the sovereignty of the North as the equivalent of their own. They cannot, indeed, accept their system of capital or its ethics. That would be to surrender and subvert their own, which they

The

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esteem to be better. Besides, if they could, what need for any division into States at all? North are equally at liberty to reject the system of the South and its ethics, and to maintain the superiority of their own by all the forces of persuasion and argument. The nation must, indeed, mutually discuss both systems. Especially must they discuss them, when they have to decide as a nation which of the two they ought to ingraft on the new and future states growing up in the great public domain. Discussion, then, being unavoidable, what could be more wise than to conduct it with mutual toleration and in a fraternal spirit?

The question of slavery in the territories settled itself according to the adaptation of the soil to slave labour. This is not a matter of sentiment or surmise, it is simply a matter of experience and history. The whole of the Northern free States were once" the homes of slavery." They all possessed that "property," and they all gradually abandoned it as of no practical value.

This process

is now going on in the Northern slave States. We may see in the table that the free negroes in Delaware were as 1 to 2 of the slaves in 1790, and as 9 to 1 in 1851. In Maryland the free blacks were to

the slaves, in 1790, as 1 to 13; and in 1851 they were as 1 to 14. In Virginia they rose from 1 to 20 to 1 to 81. Nine States holding slaves in 1709 abolished the institution within thirty years of that date. The reason for doing so was not philanthropic nor yet political, but simply a matter of dollars and cents. Slave labour in that region was not worth having. This economical principle it is which governs slavery in the territories. Slavery will not go on to any of the present unappropriated territory of the nation, for the reason that it would not be profitable to go there, if it should so it would be certain to lose; because the future States would abolish the institution on account of its inutility; and would, like Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Minnesota, forbid blacks from coming in at all, either bond or free. These are fixed and well-known principles, and when a party of political hucksters profess only "one policy," that of keeping slavery out by virtue of their acts, they profess only a bald sham, which is an insult to the intelligence of the people, whose votes they seek. As well might a party of political traders point to the influx and efflux of the tide, and pretend that their efforts alone prevent the farm-lands on the Atlantic from being drowned at each recurring flood.

Barefaced as would be such an assumption, it is not more baseless than the pretence that Kansas was "saved to freedom" by Brown and Beecher. There is no man of intelligence who does not know that if Kansas had been made a slave State, and any number of slaves had been carried into it, that a very short time only would elapse before those slaves would have been emancipated by State laws, and consequently "freedom" would have gained instead of losing. If, then, we are to believe the assertion of the Republican leader, the now Secretary of State, "one policy" only "of which he knows" is a gross deception. It has no practical force or meaning beyond its use as a means of irritating the popular mind, in order to turn votes to the party, on the strength of that exasperation; yet he denominates this sham "the great national issue between free labour and capital labour for the territories," that parties are" conducting to its inevitable solution."

From the moment of the formation of the Federal Union there commenced a struggle for political power which has not ceased to be directed against the slave States. The instrument of union, while it provided for the extinction of the slave trade, which then formed so large a portion of Northern traffic, contained also a provision for black representation