is rights. Beyond that, they will resist
his will and be refractory, if he encroaches on what they regard as
their rights, viz: the right to hold property in him as he does in them,
and to disburse that property to them in the shape of meat, bread and
vegetables, clothing, fuel and house-room, and attention to their
comforts when sick, old, infirm, and unable to labor; to hold property
in him as a conservator of the peace among themselves, and a protector
against trespassers from abroad, whether black or white; to hold
property in him as impartial judge and an honest jury to try them for
offenses, and a merciful executioner to punish them for violations of
the usages of the plantation or locality.

With those rights acceded to them, no other compulsion is necessary to
make them perform their daily tasks than _his will be done_. It is not
the whip, as many suppose, which calls forth those muscular exertions,
the result of which is sugar, cotton, breadstuffs, rice, and tobacco.
These are products of the white man's will, acting through the muscles
of the prognathous race in our Southern States. If that will were
withdrawn, and the plantations handed over as a gracious gift to the
laborers, agricultural labor would cease for the want of that spiritual
power called the will, to move those machines--the muscles. They would
cease to move here, as they have in Hayti. If the prognathous race were
expelled the land, and their place supplied with double their number of
white men, agricultural labor in the South would also cease, as far as
sugar and cotton are concerned, for the want of muscles that could
endure exercise in the smothering heat of a cane or cotton field. Half
the white laborers of Illinois are prostrated with fevers from a few
days' work in stripping blades in a Northern corn field, owing to the
confinement of the air by the close proximity of the plants. Cane and
cotton plants form a denser foliage than corn--a thick jungle, where the
white man pants for breath, and is overpowered by the heat of the sun at
one time of day, and chilled by the dews and moisture of the plants at
another. Negroes glory in a close, hot atmosphere; they instinctively
cover their head and faces with a blanket at night, and prefer laying
with their heads to the fire, instead of their feet. This ethnical
peculiarity is in harmony with their efficiency as laborers in hot,
damp, close, suffocating atmosphere--where instead of suffering and
d