s, if emancipated, will
overrun the North and West. But why should they fly from the South to
the cold winters and less genial climate of the North or West? It is
servitude which degrades the negro; and if the stigma which he now bears
is removed, why should he not cling to the region in which he was born
and bred, and to which he is adapted by nature?

Should the institution of slavery survive the war into which we have
been plunged by its adherents and propagators, we might well fear that
our Northern and Western States would be overrun by the fugitives, who,
having escaped during the war, would be disposed to place distance
between themselves and their late masters, and to fly from the borders
of States which would not hesitate to reduce them again to servitude;
but if the institution itself should be terminated by the war, why
should the free man be a fugitive from his home?

Our Western States are desirous to perpetuate in its purity the
Anglo-Saxon blood, and would colonize the West with men raised under
free institutions. They shrink from all contact with a race of bondmen.
Our President, himself a Western man, proposes to colonize the free
negro in Central America, and thriving colonies already exist on the
coast of Africa. But why should we send from this country her millions
of laborers? Is our land exhausted? Is there no room for the negro in
the region where he lives? Has not the demand for sugar and cotton, for
naval stores and timber, overtaken the supply? and has not the frank and
truthful Mr. Spratt, of South Carolina, announced in the councils of
that State, that the South must import more savages from Africa, to
reclaim and improve its soil? Why, then, banish the well-trained laborer
now on the spot?

Does not history apprise us how Spain suffered in her agriculture, and
the arts of life declined, when the Moriscos were driven from her soil?
how Belgium, the garden of Europe, decayed when Spanish intolerance
banished to England the Protestant weavers and spinners, who laid the
foundation of English opulence? how France retrograded when superstition
exiled from her shores the industrious Huguenots? And are we to draw no
light from history? Would we, at this moment, when our cotton-mills are
closing their gates,--when the cotton-spinner of England appeals to the
British minister for intervention,--when the weaver of Rouen demands the
raw material of Louis Napoleon,--shall we, at a time when a single cr