lture of a slave-holding community
exclusively in the hands of the wealthy, a tendency at war with practical
republicanism and conflicting with the best maxims of political economy.

Two hundred slaves at $200 per head would cost in the outset $40,000.
Compare this enormous outlay for the labor of a single plantation with
the beautiful system of free labor as exhibited in New England, where
every young laborer, with health and ordinary prudence, may acquire by
his labor on the farms of others, in a few years, a farm of his own, and
the stock necessary for its proper cultivation; where on a hard and
unthankful soil independence and competence may be attained by all.

Free labor is perfectly in accordance with the spirit of our
institutions; slave labor is a relic of a barbarous, despotic age. The
one, like the firmament of heaven, is the equal diffusion of similar
lights, manifest, harmonious, regular; the other is the fiery
predominance of some disastrous star, hiding all lesser luminaries around
it in one consuming glare.

Emancipation would reform this evil. The planter would no longer be
under the necessity of a heavy expenditure for slaves. He would only pay
a very moderate price for his labor; a price, indeed, far less than the
cost of the maintenance of a promiscuous gang of slaves, which the
present system requires.

In an old plantation of three hundred slaves, not more than one hundred
effective laborers will be found. Children, the old and superannuated,
the sick and decrepit, the idle and incorrigibly vicious, will be found
to constitute two thirds of the whole number. The remaining third
perform only about one third as much work as the same number of free
laborers.

Now disburden the master of this heavy load of maintenance; let him
employ free able, industrious laborers only, those who feel conscious of
a personal interest in the fruits of their labor, and who does not see
that such a system would be vastly more safe and economical than the
present?

The slave states are learning this truth by fatal experience. Most of
them are silently writhing under the great curse. Virginia has uttered
her complaints aloud. As yet, however, nothing has been done even there,
save a small annual appropriation for the purpose of colonizing the free
colored inhabitants of the state. Is this a remedy?

But it may be said that Virginia will ultimately liberate her slaves on
condition of their colonization in A