as the home country. Our negroes would have been much better than any imported coolies. With Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky under higher industrial conditions, freed from the tendency to slave barbarism, as well as to white hyper-civilization, would have been with Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, &c., the centres of trade and intelligence, and the New England tariff policy-that hindrance of our full progress-would have been met by a much higher intellectual opposition, than that given by statesmen clouded in their views by slavery. It would have been commercial and cosmopolitan in its arguments, and co-operative with the politico-economic scientists of Europe. What New York is, would have been the condition of these dozen central states of America, and the whole Union would have felt the impulse. With industrial establishments as far south as the thirty-fifth degree, with Chesapeake Bay studded with harbors for a world's commerce, and cities full of merchants, that have high mercantile culture; with New York and Philadelphia as they are now, with the inland states all having the shortest routes to the sea-shore, with slavery and negroism going out of the country, what a country and a people we would be at this time! What a future it would have had! It would indeed be the new world! There would have been no Missouri compromise in 1824, nor any "omnibus bills" in 1848, and, of course, no temptation to break faith with the north in 1854. For public opinion would have been poised on an unalterable determination never to accept slavery or the negro, as permanent parts of American society. Jefferson's presupposition that both were temporary conditions, that should be kept moving south and south-westward, would have been the persistent, intelligent, virtuous, and wise public mind of all our people. Douglas, Chase, Seward would have been as impossible after 1840 as they were before. The abortive attempts on Central America, which were finally squelched out by the execution of Nicaragua Walker, would have been directed to useful ends, for their energy would have been directed by wisdom. What was dark in Aaron Burr's plan, would have been shaped fit for light and a world's admiration. We reject, then, the so-current idea, that there was an irrepressible conflict, and that slavery could not have been got rid of without a war. The north and its ambitious men needed this excuse for their aggressions, but the cause of wise statesmanship did not. The great evils of slavery, the double demoralization, already spoken of, of both master and slave, need not have taken effect in America; nor would they have occurred for centuries, even if no great change in policy had been adopted. It is unadulterated nonsense to talk of a slave aristocracy in America, or of its effeminacy, or of a desire to subjugate the north, or of a blunting of the moral or intellectual sense by it. The southern whites were as ambitious as the northern whites, but not more so, nor in a corrupter sense. The south had some idiosyncrasies of its own, but not half so many as the north. It was far from being up to the highest standards of political and social science, but it had never been as much befogged in phrases and false assumptions, as to the nature of government, as the north was. It had, in the corrected sense, far more liberty in its composition, for it could never lose sight of the touchstone of true freedom-order. Moreover, it must be stated, that even if philanthropy were the sole criterion, still the south had more of it than the north. The natural aversion of white persons to colored folks had wore off in the south in the daily contact with each other. There was always more pro-negro sentiment in the southern slave-holder, than there was in the northern slave-seller, or his successor, the northern slave-liberator. And we feel justified in asking: Would anti-slavery ever have been popular in the north, if the abolition of the institution would have imposed upon it as great pecuniary sacrifices as it did on the south? The amount of good done in taking a million of negroes in a barbarian state and making semi-civilized folks of them, has never been credited to the south in the criminations against slavery. The negro brought nothing to this country, except his brute physical force, and all he has become since is the result of white men's care of him. That slave-holding was not all cupidity and love of gain, we may learn by seeing the kindly feeling the negroes to-day bear to their old masters. That the benefit conferred upon the negro and the owners might and therefore should have been greater than it was, is also true, but that does not take away the credit they deserve for what they did. The whole subject is, as stated, full of paradoxes. Who can reconcile the intimacies between white males and black females, with the doctrine, that the latter were not human beings? Are not the mulattoes living contradictions of the whole theory of blood and race being a justification of slavery? No person could be twenty-four hours in a southern household without witnessing incongruities and inconsistencies with this theory. We have seen white babies at negresses' breasts, and their white mothers sitting by, and even once we saw a black baby at a white lady's breast. So were there other inevitable familiarities, that convinced us, that very few, if any, southern people really believed that negroes were not human beings. We have been south both before and after the war, and must say, that we were sorry to notice that there were there social habits which, if not arrested, will make the negro an integral part of society. We mean by this, that the social economy is such, that the black man is indispensable to the maintenance of the whites, and that the whites are necessary to the negro's economic and commercial outcome. Cheap domestic service has its attractions as well as its drawbacks. Every southern household has much more male and female help than northern households, and in time this will become an inseparable element of southern society. We were struck with the similarity which Russian families present in this respect to American southern families. And we have no doubt, that the traces of American slavery will retain their impress on American society longer in the domestic arrangements, than in any other part of social life. We cannot help remembering, in this connection, that Martha Washington is the model lady of America, that she had a slave household; but neither can we forget that the best domestic economy we ever saw in America was in a northern home, where there were no servants, and the family, both old and young, male and female, co-operated in doing their own work. And we still adhere to the opinion that the latter relation is by far the most desirable for America. We would, in conclusion, neither extenuate the wrong there was in introducing, maintaining, and extending slavery; but neither would we refrain from expressing our opinion freely on the party hypocrisy, that abolished slavery in a hasty manner, and as a reckless war measure; nor on the perfidy of partisan Republicanism, that gave the negroes the elective franchise. Nero's fiddling over burning Rome is, we know it, a false charge, but it would have been an innocent amusement compared with the misgovernment, the pillage, and the villanies imposed on southern society by negro suffrage. This monstrous finale of, originally, small economic errors and wrongs, begun in 1620 on the coast of Virginia, lets us see how evils grow and fasten themselves on human society, if ethical developments are falsely directed. Hardly noticeable a hundred years after their origin, they appear significantly on the birthday of independence, and produce an equivocal utterance. Next they enter the Constitution as a political blunder, and perplex ever afterwards the Indian policy of the south, forcing removals that should never have occurred. Then came impracticable colonization schemes, in which an awakening conscientiousness sought to conceal its blushes beneath fine sentimentality. And all this time, and subsequently, political bafflings like the Missouri question and its compromises. The many well-meant social efforts at the gradual abolition of slavery culminate at first into a wise prospective abolition thereof in all the northern states, and prohibitions of its extension to the western territories; but the increased value of slaves, the importation being inhibited, stops this policy and prevents its renewal in Kentucky in 1850. Then came open and secret political abolitionism, which created political pro-slavery propagandism, and the two fostered party corruptions, election frauds, John Brown fiascos, Kanzas imbroglios, sectional exasperations, and finally war. It destroyed more wealth than all the slaves in North America ever produced. It left debts on the Union, the states, and their municipalities that are now the cancer in our politics; for it has bred the spirit of repudiation, first as constitutional amendment forced on the south, and then as reaction by popular recusancy in the states and their municipalities. The fruits of the war are a disordered currency, paper money, legal tender acts, outrageous taxation, corruption in high places, even in the White House, election frauds, soldier voting, negro suffrage, carpet bagging, negro vagabondism, a disintegrated southern society, protective tariffs, crippled shipbuilding, and a foreign commerce in foreign bottoms; a demoralized public service, a -President counted in, and holding on under cover of good intentions! And the negro? Still a victim! How true of such wrongs are Goethe's words : "Like chronic diseases they are hereditary; They pass from sire to son, to all their progeny, And move insidiously from place to place. They turn sense into nonsense, benevolence into a plague: We are glad that the subject passes from our hands. CHAPTER XIV. EMIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION. "It seems a natural law of mankind to keep moving."-Gregorovius. FROM time immemorial America has been a country immigrated into; and those, who came and stayed have sought to ascribe to it some self-flattering reasons for this fact, and have called it: "Asylum of the oppressed," " Refuge of free labor," and "Land of the free, and home of the brave." Its enemies invented nicknames such as Abode of the fortune-hunter," "The country that has no settled homes;" and misanthropic Lenau added: "It is a land to which crime Flies trembling o'er the sea." To us all these designations are fancy sketches, for they spring from transitory conditions, that are not even truthfully described. We long to realize to our mind an America, that neither receives immigrants too largely, nor furnishes many emigrants; and whose population is not migratory as now; for then only will come its true civilization. But in contemplating such a future American society, there rises before our mind, like a deep shadow, the fact that scientific men are still hunting for an indigenous American, that they have really given up all hope of finding him in the living races of this land, and that there is but little hope even of finding his buried bones. So far as North America is concerned, the inhabitants were ever roaming, never correcting social evils except by moving. And in Central America the Spaniards found, on arrival, a faith in and ready submission to a prophecy, that men would rise out of the ocean and subjugate them; as if this fate was but the renewal of an inherent law of the land and a repeating of an old tradition. And we ask, not tremblingly, and yet not without anxiety: Whether a similar end awaits our posterity? Our children smile at all such apprehensions, and as theirs is the future of this country, be it good or bad, we leave them to their joyful disposition; though we fear their cheers are like those of |