nd the slaves the victims
of their cruelty; but, says the writer, just so long as you take our
cotton, we shall have our slaves. Now, you are as really involved in
this matter as we are--[Hear, hear!]--and if you have no other right to
speak on the subject, you have a right to speak from being yourselves
very active participators in the wrong. You have a great deal of feeling
on the subject, honorable and generous feeling, I know--an earnest,
philanthropic, Christian feeling; but if you have nothing to do, that
feeling will all evaporate, and leave an apathy behind. Now, here is
something to be done. It may be a small beginning, but, as you go
forward, Providence will develop other plans, and the more you do, the
further you will see. I am happy to know that a beginning has been made.
There are indications that a way has been so opened in providence that
this exigency can be met. Within the last few years, the Chinese have
begun to emigrate to the western parts of the United States. They will
maintain themselves on small wages; and wherever they come into actual
competition with slave labor, it cannot compete with them. Very many of
the slaveholders have spoken of this as a very remarkable indication. If
slavery had been confined to the original slave states, as it was
intended, slavery could not have lived. It was the intention that it
should never go beyond those boundaries. Had this been the case, it
would increase the number of slaves so much that they would have been
valueless as articles of property. I must say this for America, that the
slaves increase in the slave states faster than the white people; and it
shows that their physical condition is better than was that of the
slaves at the West Indies, or in Cuba, where the number actually
diminished. We must have more slave territories to make our slaves
valuable, and there was the origin of that iniquitous Mexican war,
whereby was added the vast territory of Texas; and then it was the
intention to make California a slave state; but, I am happy to say, it
has been received into the Union as a free state, and God grant it may
continue so. [Hear, hear!] What has been the effect of this expansion of
slave territory? It has doubled the value of slaves. Since I can
remember, a strong slave man would sell for about four hundred or six
hundred dollars--that is, about one hundred pounds; but now, during the
present season, I have known instances in which a slave man has bee