considers the extremely low diet of the negroes one reason
for the absence of crimes of a savage nature among them; most of them do
not touch meat the year round. But in this respect they certainly do not
resemble the Irish, who contrive upon about as low a national diet as
civilisation is acquainted with, to commit the bloodiest and most frequent
outrages with which civilisation has to deal. His statement that it is
impossible to bribe the negroes to work on their own account with any
steadiness may be generally true, but admits of quite exceptions enough to
throw doubt upon its being natural supineness in the race rather than the
inevitable consequence of denying them the entire right to labour for
their own profit. Their laziness seems to me the necessary result of their
primary wants being supplied, and all progress denied them. Of course, if
the natural spur to exertion, necessity, is removed, you do away with the
will to work of a vast proportion of all who do work in the world. It is
the law of progress that a man's necessities grow with his exertions to
satisfy them, and labour and improvement thus continually act and react
upon each other to raise the scale of desire and achievement; and I do not
believe that, in the majority of instances among any people on the face of
the earth, the will to labour for small indulgences would survive the loss
of freedom and the security of food enough to exist upon. Mr. ---- said
that he had offered a bribe of twenty dollars apiece, and the use of a
pair of oxen, for the clearing of a certain piece of land, to the men on
his estate, and found the offer quite ineffectual to procure the desired
result; the land was subsequently cleared as usual task work under the
lash. Now, certainly, we have among Mr. ----'s people instances of men who
have made very considerable sums of money by boat-building in their
leisure hours, and the instances of almost life-long persevering stringent
labour by which slaves have at length purchased their own freedom and that
of their wives and children, are on record in numbers sufficient to prove
that they are capable of severe sustained effort of the most patient and
heroic kind for that great object, liberty. For my own part, I know no
people who doat upon labour for its own sake; and it seems to me quite
natural to any absolutely ignorant and nearly brutish man, if you say to
him, 'No effort of your own can make you free, but no absence of effort
sha