ed with cannon more
effective than any yet used in naval warfare. It is to encounter, with
conscripts, a million of hardy volunteers, and to do this with its
supplies reduced and its credit broken. It has but one reliance: a slave
population of four millions, competent to maintain themselves, but
incompetent to furnish to their masters a full supply of the coarsest
food. While it furnishes a scanty supply, while it toils in the
trenches, and feeds the horses of the cavalry, or drives the
army-wagons, it is still an element of strength to the masters, and the
question occurs, Shall the nation, now so severely taxed by the
slaveholder, and compelled to pour forth its best blood like water to
preserve its existence, remove this element of present and future
strength by liberating the slave?

Can the slaveholder claim the preservation of slavery, when he relies
upon it and uses it to aid him in destroying the Government? And if
one-half of the population of the South is ready to sustain the
Government, and to withdraw its aid from the foe, shall not the
loyalist, whether white or black, be accepted and allowed the privileges
of a citizen when he takes refuge under the national flag?

Can we expect future peace, unless we reduce to order lawless men,
unless we draw them from the war-path by making labor and the arts of
peace respected?

This is a momentous question which addresses itself to our nation at the
present juncture. There are some who imagine that the negro, if
liberated, would renew the scenes of San Domingo, and massacre the
people of the South. But such has not been the case in the French and
British Isles of the West Indies, although in those islands the
proportion of the white population is far below that at the South. In
the Cotton States the whites and the negroes are nearly equal in
numbers; and if, in Jamaica, Barbadoes, Santa Cruz, and Martinique, the
slaves, when liberated, have respected the rights of the masters, and
recognized their title to the land, and have submitted to toil for
moderate wages, where a handful of whites monopolized the soil, and
demanded for it prices far beyond the value of the slave and land
together, may we not well anticipate that the slave population, barely
equal in number to the white population, trained to submission in a
region where land is of little value, will, if liberated, continue to be
a quiet and peaceful population?

There are some who predict that the negroe