years of unpaid toil, the means of buying themselves from
their masters, would soon justify their freedom by the intelligent
improvement of their condition), as that many of the present landholders
would be ready and glad to alienate their impoverished estates by parcels,
and sell the land which has become comparatively unprofitable to them, to
its enfranchised cultivators. This, the future ownership of land by
negroes, as well as their admission to those rights of citizenship which
everywhere in America such ownership involves, would necessarily be future
subjects of legislation; and either or both privileges might be withheld
temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently, as might seem expedient, and
the progress in civilisation which might justify such an extension of
rights. These, and any other modifications of the state of the black
population in the South, would require great wisdom to deal with, but
their immediate transformation from bondsmen to free might, I think, be
accomplished with little danger or difficulty, and with certain increase
of prosperity to the Southern States.

On the other hand, it is not impossible that, left to the unimpeded action
of the natural laws that govern the existence of various races, the black
population, no longer directly preserved and propagated for the purposes
of slavery, might gradually decrease and dwindle, as it does at the
North--where, besides the unfavourable influence of a cold climate on a
race originally African, it suffers from its admixture with the whites,
and the amalgamation of the two races, as far as it goes, tends evidently
to the destruction of the weaker. The Northern mulattoes are an unhealthy
feeble population, and it might yet appear that even under the more
favourable influence of a Southern climate, whenever the direct stimulus
afforded by slavery to the increase of the negroes was removed, their
gradual extinction or absorption by the predominant white race would
follow in the course of time.

But the daily course of events appears to be rendering more and more
unlikely the immediate effectual enfranchisement of the slaves: the
President's proclamation will reach with but little efficacy beyond the
mere borders of the Southern States. The war is assuming an aspect of
indefinite duration; and it is difficult to conceive what will be the
condition of the blacks, freed _de jure_ but by no means _de facto_, in
the vast interior regions of the Southern State