of parties was held to be enough. They are marriages of custom, which is law. Those performed by a magistrate have almost as little formality. Negro marriages are not the less enduring from their lack of form. They usually last for life. We do not believe that the severance of the marriage tie among slaves is more frequent, from whatever cause, than it is, from various circumstances, in other quarters. Scotland, where the mere consent sand four hundred and sixty-eight, to say nothing of other punishments. She is at a loss for colonies to receive her felons. Whips, chains, jails, halberds, convict ships, are in constant requisition. In New York the most atrocious crimes are constantly committed. Every hour brings its scandalous chronicle; every day proclaims a murder. On the other hand, it may be confidently asserted, that there are fewer crimes among the slaves of the Southern States than among the laboring class of any people in the world. The reason is obvious. Every master is a conservator of the peace and of good morals. is deeply interested in their preservation. No police can be as efficient as he is in the prevention of vice, in the suppression of idleness and drunkenness especially-the fruitful sources of so many crimes. The chastity of the negro race is not remarkable. Young females are loose in their conduct, it is admitted; but they will bear comparison, nevertheless, with hired labourers. In the "Sanitary Reports," a witness says of a particular parish: "I believe this parish to be fearfully demoralized. It is said that twenty years ago there was not one young female cottager of virtuous character." At an inquest held in Leeds, as stated in a Leeds paper, "it was asserted by the coroner, and assented to by the surgeon as probable, that three hundred infants, in Leeds alone, were put to death every year, to avoid the consequences of their living, and the murderers are never discovered." The mass of pollution reeking with all the vices and diseases attendant on prostitution, exhibited to curious eyes in portions of the great Northern and European cities, is too horrible to describe. Words that would adequately paint it would be unfit to be spoken before even the vilest profligates. The general morals are no better. The Westminster Review says of the masses in England, "as regards depravity, brutality and crime, they are no way superior to the worst population in any other country." In 1846, the number, in England, whipped, fined, and discharged, was two thou Не If from morals we pass on to the topic of intellectual improvement or of education in its simplest forms, those of reading and writing, we shall discover no very serious difference in the attainments of the hired man and the bondsman. It is imputed to the slaveholder, that he will not permit his slave to learn. There is nothing to prevent the slave from learning. If laws exist prohibiting it, these laws are obsolete. Thousands of slaves read their Bibles and hymn books, and are taught in the families to which they belong. But suppose the ignorance to be unbroken, and that not one slave can read a sentence, or write his name. In this, also, the parallel will hold good between hired men and bondsmen. The Review already quoted says "onehalf of the people of Great Britain can neither read nor write." In the one hundred and forty-one thousand registered marriages of the year, nearly one-half of the parties could not write their names. Mr. Every persons without support. Alison asserts that in France "twothirds of the people can neither read nor write." It seems, then, that the white labourers of England and France are no better instructed than the black slaves of America. After so many centuries of freedom, in countries of the highest civilization, the hired man, Saxon or Celt, knows no more than the bondsman, who was yesterday a barbarian in Africa. The last radical deficiencies of the hired excites the profound sympathy of labour system. The socialists have the Englishman-the first no sym- failed. The statesman is at fault. pathy at all. The future presents no better prospect. The facts relating to the condition of the European labourer are from British authorities. We have given a few only; they may be multiplied a thousand-fold from the same source. A few are enough to prove that so far as concerns their habitations, food, morals, and ability to read or write, the comparison with the white hired man is not disadvantageous to the negro bonds man. But this is not all. There are radical defects in the system of hired labour, which seem to defy every effort to remedy them. There are numbers of labourers who will not work there are numbers who cannot work. For these two clas ses, no adequate provision is made, or perhaps can be made. There is no mode by which the thousands of idlers, trampers, smugglers, thieves, drunkards, poachers, can be fixed to honest labour. They are an injury, not a help, to society. There is no sufficient support for the help less, the sick, the old, the infirm. They suffer accordingly. For these defects and evils, no sagacity has devised a remedy. In a slave population, there are no idlers, trampers, smugglers, poachers, drunkards, who live to drink, or thieves who live by stealing. An occasional runaway is the only approach to them. There are no helpless But, suppose it be admitted that, in spite of all defects, the system of money wages for labour is better than subsistence among a superior race; it will not follow that they are better for an inferior one. Whatever may be true of the Saxon or Celts, slavery is the only system of labour that suits the lazy and improvident negro. Experience is forcing this truth on the convictions of the English people. Their experiment has been a costly one. The result is total disappointment. It was confidently asserted by enthusiasts, who knew nothing of the negro, that if manumitted he would do more work than before; it turns out that he does no work at all. "The freed West Indian negro will not till the soil for wages." "The Englishman has sunk his thousands and tens of thousands on mills and machinery, and the languishing estates return beggary and debts." The negro "eats his yams and sniggers at the buckra." "The freed negro not only detests, but despises honest, steady industry." This is what the "London Times" has lately said. Is it not time for the British Parliament to inquire, by a committee, into the differences between ruined Jamaica and prosperous Cuba, and into the causes of the differences. They can never get back their millions, but they may learn something valuable from the loss of so much money, "distilled from the brain and muscles of the free English labourer of every degree."* It is not England alone who has been involved in terrible losses by the folly and madness of rulers. With France, as well as Great Britain, there is much to be undone of former counsels. The wealthiest and most flourishing of European colonies, seventy years ago the gem of French commerce, is now the haunt of revolted slaves and black barbarians—a blotch on the world's civilization and a stain on the honor of France. The ungenerous interference of England, seeking advantage in her neighbour's calamities, precipitated the evil. After snatching in vain at the fairest possessions of the French people and contributing to its loss, English societies, of which Clarkson and Wilberforce were lights and leaders, declared that the insurgent slaves were excusable in inflicting "the most exquisite tortures" on their former masters. Why are the vestiges of this wrong and insult suffered to remain uneffaced? Why are the armies and navy of the Emperor of the French sent to defend supposed interests in the Crimea, or to protect Northern Italy, or to extend the desert limits of Algeria, or to reassert old claims in Cochin China, and punish her for a murdered Missionary, while the loveliest of islands, the most valuable ancient colony of France, is left unreclaimed, and the blood of French women and children unavenged on its soil? What incalculable advantages would this magnificent island bestow on the commerce of France, on the industry of her people, on the navy which is so sedulously cared for, by affording a field of enterprise for her youth, a source of wealth for her merchants, a nursery of seamen for her ships. To possess a navy requires a commercial marine. In 1790, St. Domingo afforded employment to near seven hundred French ships, averaging three hundred and twenty-five tons, and employing fifteen thousand seamen. Her exports amounted to nearly twenty-five million dollars. She had eight hundred sugar plantations, and more than eight thousand of cotton, coffee and indigo. Her soil was so fertile, her advantages of irrigation so great, that she produced two-thirds more to the acre than the English island, Jamaica. She was beyond all com. parison the most prosperous colony in the world, and immense resources remained yet undeveloped. Her wealth has disappeared; the wilderness has resumed its former place, and savages are suffered to occupy her rich plains and valleys, and to prevent their cultivation, while France looks on and makes no sign. Carlyle declares in his emphatic way, that the world will not permit Cuffee to lie on his back forever and eat pumpkins in fields intended by nature to produce luxuries for the whole world. If France continues apathetic, some other power will, in time, interfere, and restore wealth civilization and refinement to the noblest of the Antilles. But, to return to our argument: Although it may be proven that the negro slave is better "fed, clad and cared for," than the hired labourer; that he is as moral, or more so; that if young female slaves have illegitimate children they do not resort to the murder of their infants to avoid the consequences; that the black slave reads and writes as well as the white slaves of Great Britain, *London Times. as they are called by the "Northern Times," of Liverpool; that the slave system assures him all this; it weighs nothing with the abolitionist. He has an answer ready-the negro slaves are "human cattle." A contemptuous term for the negro is the abolitionist's chosen reply. We need not wonder at the con tempt cast upon the black slave, since the "Times" assures us the white slave is treated with the same scorn, if not called by the same name, by the same parties in England. But why "human cattle?" If well fed, clad, cared for, as moral, as well taught as the hired man, why are slaves "human cattle," in the estimation and language of the opponent of slavery? What is the cause of the contemptuous rhetoric so freely bestowed on the humble slave by his self appointed advocates? Is anything yet wanting to place him in a condition as favourable as that of the hired labourer? Yes, it is replied, he is liable to be sold from plantation to plantation. This is the master evil that sinks the slave into a worse situation than his brother labourer's, and subjects him to the contemptuous pity of the gentle philanthropist of Europe and America-this makes him "human cattle" and a "chattel labourer." In the sale of slaves nothing but labour is transferred. It passes from master to master, as it passes, in countries of hired labour, from employer to employer. The mode in which the transfer is made, differs in the two systems of labour. The slave labourer is never compelled to hunt for work and starve till he finds it. Is this an evil to the labourer? Would it be thought an evil, by the hired man in Europe, that his employer should be obliged, by law, to find him another employer before dismissing him from service? It is what the socialist is striving to accomplish. The labour of the slave is sold by one master to another; the labour of the hired man is sold by himself. He gets no more for his work than the slave gets-subsistence. more than this when he is able to He gets no find a purchaser for his labour. But what, when he is not able? Labour gives 'subsistence to the labourer, nothing more. slave is sold by another, and his The labour of the subsistence is certain; the labour of the hired man is sold by himself, and his subsistence is uncertain. The employment of the one is sure, that of the other precarious. Which is the better condition of the two? relation between master and slave The greater permanency of the is in itself an advantage. It produces kindlier feelings from one to the other. bonds of union. It removes what It draws closer the Stuart Mill calls "the widening and embittering feud between the class of labour and the class of capital." It identifies their interests. There is no hostile sentiment between the negro slave and his master; there never has been, but from the outside influence of ignorant or malignant philanthropists. Slaves rarely run. to the North except when seduced and deceived. And when there their masters and slavery. they are often glad to get back to much exposed to the master's abuse But, it is said, the slave is too of power; he is liable to wrongs without a remedy; and, so far, his condition is below that of the hired labourer. regards the able-bodied hired man If this be true at all, it is true as only. But take into the account children and women, those for example that work naked in coal mines, or wives whose sufferings from the brutal treatment of husbands daily fill the reports of police courts; take these into the reckon ing and the difference in the conse quences of abused power will be is as stated. The two races never very small. The negro slave is as amalgamate, notwithstanding the thoroughly protected as any la- sneer about cohabitation, which our bourer in Europe. He is protected late traveller is coarse enough to from every other man's wrong-doing repeat. The feeble race will die by the ready interference of his out. Let there be peace or war, the master; he is guarded from the result is equally certain. In friendmaster's abuse by the laws of the ly Pennsylvania, and in the land of land, and a vigilant, earnest public "Miles Standish, the Puritan Capopinion. Let all cruelty be pun- tain," the end is the same. The ished; let all abuse of power be red man has disappeared. Such restrained; but to abolish the rela- will be the fate of the negro, if he tion of master and slave, because is set free. The manumitted slaves there are bad masters and ill-treated of New York have vanished from slaves, would be not a whit wiser the country. The free blacks of than to abolish marriage, because New England are not increasing, there are brutal husbands and mur- notwithstanding the thousands of dered wives. runaways and enfranchised that yearly overflow her borders. Stop the immigration and the blacks would disappear. In Australia, at the Cape, wherever the white can establish himself, the black man is annihilated. Nothing, but climate, saves him in Congo, or Guinea. Slavery protects the negro from a position of antagonism to the Caucasian race, and slavery alone can protect him where climate does not. Yet, surely, it will be said, it must be admitted, after all, that slavery is an evil. Yes, certainly, it is an evil; but in the same sense only in which servitude or hired labour is an evil. To gain one's bread by the sweat of one's brow, is a curse. But it is a curse attended with a blessing. It is an evil which shuts out a greater evil. "Withouten that would come a heavier bale, Loose life, unruly passions and diseases pale." Do the foolish intermedlers with the slavery of the South pretend to devise any scheme for escaping this Labour for wages, labour for sub- monstrous result of the manumissistence, and subjection to the au- sion they are recommending? How thority of employer or master are dumb they would be on the subject, the conditions on which alone the if it were a condition that they labouring masses, white or black, should propose their new law with can live, with advantage to them- a halter about their necks, and be selves or the State. In the case of hanged, should they offer no rationthe negro slave, it is essential to his al mode by which the accomplishwell-being to continue subject to ment of their own purpose can be the rule under which he lives, not brought about. When staggered only for the reason that affects the by the difficulty, when driven from hired man-to escape loose life and their rhetorical common places, its consequences-but, for another now worn thread-bare from half a and a stronger inducement. Slave- century's use, they murmur some ry is essential to his existence. platitude, like that in a late review Manumission would destroy him. of Nott's book, some sentimental An inferior race must perish when made by position antagonists to a stronger one. It is idle to quarrel with the laws of nature. The fact no-meaning, on the ideality of freedom. The ideality of freedom may be something to a gentleman concocting an article for a Review with |