any years a
specialty of the subject, and having had placed at his disposal the
published and unpublished papers and records of every ministry of
Europe, as, for instance, of the English Board of Trade, M. Cochin has
accumulated a mass of extremely valuable material--all of which is
presented in a very clear, perfectly well arranged form--and which we
need not say should be read by every one in public, since there is
certainly no intelligent American at the present day on whom the
necessity of acquiring full information on this subject is not almost a
solemn duty. Next after crushing rebellion, the great task of the
Federal Government should be to organize labor and adopt a vigorous
_central_ and _industrial_ policy. To do this, the relations of free and
of slave labor to circumstances should be extensively studied. As in the
case of all wars involving an institution, the question between the
North and the South at the present day is simply one between ignorance
and knowledge--knowledge such as books like this are eminently adapted
to disseminate.

Passing by religious and philosophic argument, neither of which has been
of much practical avail in this country, since we see the Church of the
South quite as zealous in upholding slavery on Biblical grounds as that
of the North is in opposing it, we come to Cochin's first real
argument--that political economy affirms the superiority of free over
forced labor. Policy and charity unite in this--'charity detests slavery
because it oppresses; policy, more elevated, condemns it _because it
corrupts the inferior race_.'

We call attention to this sentence because it accurately expresses the
difference between mere 'Abolition,' which regarded only the sufferings
of the blacks, and that higher and more comprehensive policy of
'EMANCIPATION FOR THE SAKE OF THE WHITE MAN,' which declares that
slavery always in time inevitably makes of the slaveholder an
intolerable neighbor to the free white laborer. From this point our
author sets forth the gradual growth of the aversion to slavery all over
the Continent, with the reactionary tendency in its favor in the Cotton
United States and in England. It is needless to say that, before the
overwhelming light of _facts_ presented, especially when these facts are
drawn from the past as well as the present, and from every country
instead of _one_, slavery is shown to be more than deadly-conservative;
more than cruel; more than a mere dead wall