en thousand seven
hundred and eighty-nine dwellings. The five slave States have five
hundred and six thousand nine hundred and sixty-eight families, and four
hundred and ninety-six thousand three hundred and sixty-nine dwellings.
Here we see the astonishing fact, that with an equal population, New
England has eleven thousand five hundred and sixty-four more families
than these five slave States, and that these five slave States have
forty-eight thousand five hundred and eighty more dwellings than New
England--so that New England actually has seventy thousand seven hundred
and forty-three families without a home. In New England one family in
every _seven_ is without a home, while in these five old slave States
only one family in every _fifty-two_ is without a home.
According to the average number of persons composing a family, New
England has three hundred and seventy-three thousand seven hundred of
her people thrown upon the world without a place to call home.
It is truly painful to think of the effects upon morals and virtue,
which must flow from this state of things; and it is a pleasure to a
philanthropic heart to think of the superior condition of the
slaveholding people, who so generally have homes, where parents can
throw the shield of protection around their offspring, and guard them
against the dangers and demoralizing tendencies of an unprotected
condition.
There is another class of facts, equally astonishing, disclosed by the
census, and which belong to the comparison we are now making, between
States which were organized originally by Puritan orthodoxy and New
England freedom on one side, and by infidel slaveholders and slavery on
the other. They are facts which relate to natural increase in a State.
One of the boasts of Northern freemen is the _increase_ of their
population. With such a climate as New England, it was to be expected
that the people would increase faster, and live longer, than in the
climate of these five slave States. It is well known that a large
portion of the population of these five Southern States have a fatal
climate to contend with, and that everywhere else on the globe, under
similar circumstances, a diminished increase of births, and an increased
amount of deaths has been the result. But the census, as if disregarding
climate, and slavery, and the universal experience of all ages,
testifies that there is twenty-seven per cent. more of births, and
thirty-three per cent. less of
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