to accomplish. These States would, without the negro population, lose much of their most picturesque, most peculiar life; besides which, they could not dispense with negro labour. It is declared that rice, cotton, and sugar could not be cultivated without the negro, who is habituated to the heat of the sun, and to whom it is a delight. The white man dies of the heat and the miasmas which are produced by the soil; the black man, on the contrary, flourishes there, increases and multiplies, or merely suffers slightly from climatic fevers. When the circumstances are favourable between the white and the black, it is evident that there exists no inimical relationship between them; they love each other and are attracted to each other; equally unlike, their respective deficiencies perfect nature. The good-tempered, cheerful negro loves the grave, sensible white man, and allows himself to be guided by him, and he, in his turn, loves the good-hearted black man, and allows himself to be tended by him.
I say nothing, but what noble and thinking men in the Slave States consider to be possible, when I state to your Majesty the conviction that the noblest, because the most difficult, future endeavour of the Slave States ought to be the converting of one portion of its slave population into free labourers. I say one portion, because it is clear that merely one portion thereof would be capable of remaining, as free men, under American dominion. The portion of the slave population which longs to go to Africa should go there; and that portion which is attached to the soil and the people of America, and which is capable of acquiring its cultivation and its active laborious spirit, should remain in its Southern States, where it has been brought up, to which it belongs, by nature, habitude, and affections, and where the colouring and the romantic life of these lands, beloved by the sun, would be greatly increased by their life of labour on the plantations and
