than the slave state
in Africa." And your black delegates, fearful of the influence of these
missionaries, as well as on account of the inadequate supply of
captives, are now preparing to procure the able-bodied and comparatively
industrious Kroomen of the interior, by _purchasing from their headmen_
the privilege of inveigling them to the West India market! So ends the
magnificent farce--perhaps I should say tragedy, of West India
abolition! I will not harrow your feelings by asking you to review the
labors of your life and tell me what you and your brother enthusiasts
have accomplished for "injured Africa," but while agreeing with Lord
Stowell, that "villeinage decayed," and admitting that slavery might do
so also, I think I am fully justified by passed and passing events in
saying, as Mr. Grosvenor said of the slave trade, that its _abolition_
is "impossible."

Yon are greatly mistaken, however, if you think that the consequences of
emancipation here would be similar and no more injurious than those
which followed from it in your little sea-girt West India Islands, where
nearly all were blacks. The system of slavery is not in "decay" with us.
It flourishes in full and growing vigor. Our country is boundless in
extent. Dotted here and there with villages and fields, it is, for the
most part, covered with immense forests and swamps of almost unknown
size. In such a country, with a people so restless as ours,
communicating of course some of that spirit to their domestics, can you
conceive that any thing short of the power of the master over the slave,
could confine the African race, notoriously idle and improvident, to
labor on our plantations? Break this bond, but for a day, and these
plantations will be solitudes. The negro loves change, novelty, and
sensual excitements of all kinds, _when awake_. "Reason and order," of
which Mr. Wilberforce said "liberty was the child," do not characterize
him. Released from his present obligations, his first impulse would be
to go somewhere. And here no natural boundaries would restrain him. At
first they would all seek the towns, and rapidly accumulate in squalid
groups upon their outskirts. Driven thence by the "armed police," which
would immediately spring into existence, they would scatter in all
directions. Some bodies of them might wander toward the "free" States,
or to the Western wilderness, marking their tracks by their depredations
and their corpses. Many would roam wild