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not disposed to labor, only enough to supply an immediate necessity for the day or the morrow,-living mostly on the natural productions of the country. They can subsist on plantains and bananas, with the fish obtained from the ocean, the obtaining of which requires but little labor. The whites have retrograded, and of late, have commingled with the blacks in licentiousness. The estates, once so large and prosperous, abounding in all material prosperity and wealth, are dilapidated, wasting all that greatness and luxury, for which man pushes forward his highest aspirations. If the land proprietors of the West Indies where the slaves have been manumitted, should exert themselves to plant sugar-cane or cotton, the disposition of the negroes is snch, that they know no bounds to their extortion and rapacity, till the planters themselves are reduced to poverty, after making one or two ineffectual efforts to rear themselves to former prosperity and happiness. The population in the West Indies has rapidly decreased, and what remains, is concentrating into small towns and cities, presenting all that poverty and debasement, so common to the manumission of slaves in America, both among the whites and blacks. Consequently, the country is fast returning to its original state,—that of a howling wilderness. And this would be the condition of the Southern United States, were we to follow the most moral examples of our most Christian neighbors, which would decrease the luxuries and comforts of the world, to the amount of near 300,000,000 of dollars per year, in the productions of rice, tobacco, sugar, cotton, and other tropical products.

Ere the course of production could change, and give material impulse to the manufacturing interests in the North, the country, both North and South, in such an event, with all its architectural grandeur at present, would fade and become a moldering pile of ruins, like those we have seen in Mexico and Central America, and those described by Stephens; for human nature and human will are the same in every region!

We see what has been the fate of nations engaged in civil war, and may we not, our fellow-countrymen, North and South, East and West, stay this awful curse we are forcing on ourselves, and entailing to posterity? We conjure you all by the ties of fraternal accord to pause and reason, ere humanity may cease to be humanity! Some have the impudence to say that reason, at present, produces nothing! Reason has made us what we were two years ago, and what is war making us both North and South, East and West? Who cannot tell the tale of some distress, and who is not in favor of peace and prosperity? letting this be at the sacrifice of prejudice, but based on reason's side and the command of God! As before mentioned, the decrease, in production from the manumission of the Southern slaves, would be a most delicious pill to take, in order to follow the most moral examples of the European nations, which, at the present conjuncture of international affairs, would revolutionize and impoverish all those nations, that have been fostered by our commerce and productions. The picture of Mexico, and the Central and South American provinces, that formerly belonged to Spain, is

one, since the emancipation of their negroes, which forbids the rest of mankind to imitate; for what do we see in those tropical divisions but distress, misery, and poverty, with all the concomitant evils which beset the human race, and progressive existences of color in anarchy and confusion! Under the Spanish sway, the regions alluded to, had progressed rapidly in the advancement of agriculture, and commerce, and in the general improvements of the roads, and the concentration of its population into small villages and cities, and also in the mode of developing the mineral resources of the country. Negro slavery and peonage were, before the Revolution, sanctioned by the Spanish government, and though the lands were held by extensive grants brought partially under cultivation, the profits of agriculture were so great and munificent in augmenting the wealth of the proprietors, that they produced the most happy effects upon the whole body politic, in distributing their wealth among the mechanics, artizans, and men of science, in the construction of bridges and roads, in erecting temples for worship, halls of learning in law, medicine, and commerce, and in the building of towns and cities, which are common centers in the discussion of liberty and tyranny!

In taking a survey of the powerful governments of Europe, and more especially of its small divisions, we feel pained to see human misery and depravity forced by preconceived legislation upon people of one congeneric origin, of the same color and of the same natural abilities. In the conquest and re-conquest of the European States, the feudal system has prevailed

in the partition of the lands among the nobles; though the conqueror claimed first all the lands, and in the next place, the people as his vassals. Under this system, the nobles farmed out their lands to those inferior in rank, until they descended to the peasantry, who cultivate the soils, and in most cases, formerly they were a part and parcel of the estates, and could not be transferred without the transfer of the soil. In return for their labor they obtain a scant allowance for themselves, and dare not manifest any increase in prosperity, fearing that they might be informed on, and in this event, they would be forced to yield any material prosperity which they desire for their own accommodation. This may be gleaned from European works. Such is the course of taxation, espionage, rentage, and retaining vassals to labor, in Denmark, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Turkey, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Bavaria, Greece, Russia and Austria, with few exceptions in certain provinces and divisions, in Europe; in Egypt, the Barbary States, Central and Southern Africa, in Africa; and in Turkey, Asia Minor, Persia, India, Tartary, China and Japan, in Asia; that, though their system of exacting tribute and forcing the peasantry to till the soil, may bear the opposite name to slavery in the United States, Cuba and Brazil, yet human baseness, ignorance and vice are as low as it is in the nature of human beings or progressive existences to descend! This class scarcely know what they will have to-morrow for their subsistence. This we gather from works on the feudal system and population of Europe.

The choice and the luxuries of the land, though raised by the peasantry themselves, are yielded up to the proprietors; and the peasants dare not partake, because they are ever fearful of being informed on. Such is the servile disposition of the peasantry to gain favors of their superiors. Scarcely have they clothing to hide their nudity, living in mere huts, without the most common comforts possessed by the negroes of the South, of Cuba or Brazil. Such is the oppression of man to his own color, that he blushes not to feel himself a man tinctured with inhumanity and wanton cruelty to man! Such is the degradation of the peasantry, both in the cities and in the country, that by their religion they are taught to marry very young, and desire large families, to be reared in the same way as themselves, acting out the lowest desires of animal instinct. Like animals in parts of Europe and Asia, they are forced to perform the labors of the field, and that, too, with implements of the most ordinary nature, as first conceived, and in others, with implements which are no better than sticks or forked prongs of trees. In most of these old countries, it is seldom that the plow is used-the labor is performed by the common people with the most inferior manual implements. Hence, there is no progress among the peasantry of the most of Europe, and the whole of Asia and Africa. The fundamental evil in most of these countries is the insecurity of the cultivator against exorbitant exactions. Such will be ever the case in central Governments, towards which all Republics bend.

The desire of rising in the world; the dread of