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opened the question of emancipation as a point of State policy to be met hereafter at the polls, by a courteous response to the resolutions of Congress. Western Virginia, by astonishing majorities, has virtually decided that question in the affirmative; while in Eastern Virginia, where the name "contraband" itself had origin, the shock of war is likely to leave very little standing of what the government policy may spare." A year of war has had the effect, apparently, of pushing back the frontier line of slavery an average of some two hundred miles.

But this superficial and visible effect shown in the policy of States is of less account than the wholesale process of disintegration that accompanies the steps of revolution. For every batch of slaves hurried southward to a market already overstocked and stagnant, an equal number have herded within the shelter of camps or under the guns of forts, or have improved the confusion of the time for flight to the bleak lands of promise in the North. Every acre that is forsaken, every cotton-bale that is burnt, every field-hand that is turned from the raising of the great staples of the market to the planting of corn, or twisting of hemp, or heaping up of earthworks, every body-servant lost, strayed, or stolen by the accidents of war, does something to weaken the system for whose sake the blow was struck. Slavery, as we have known and understood it, has been a thing depending for its very life-breath on access to foreign markets, on the world's demand for the raw produce of its fields. What it shall become smothered under a blockade, with its vital currents turned back upon itself, changing its system of industry, destroying its costly

Since this paragraph was written, we have met the following testimony of a newspaper correspondent: "If the rebels are now driven out of Virginia, and still persist in this rebellion, in the course of a few weeks the institution of slavery in Virginia will be turned upside down and inside out by this contraband movement. First, the extortions of the rebel army, and secondly, the spoliations and destructive work of the Vandals in our own army, have literally reduced hundreds of Virginia families, who were wealthy one year ago, to downright beggary." Governor Letcher says, in a recent message: "The loss to the citizens of Virginia in the item of slave property alone far exceeds the loss from the destruction of cotton or any other species of property during the war. Counties in Virginia have been overrun, containing an aggregate slave population of 80,728 by the late census, and which, at a moderate valuation, is worth, in round numbers, $ 45,000,000."

products in despair, demoralized by the presence of hostile camps, crowded into a narrowing area by a vast armed emigration, it may not be easy to guess; certainly it will be something very different from the domineering system whose political loyalty and industrial creed were summed up in the phrase "Cotton is king."

Some of these effects may seem far off, speculative, and unreal. But one result is tangible to the most callous touch, intelligible to the meanest capacity. War only precipitates the crisis which other processes would have brought on more slowly. The time is fast coming when slavery, as a system of industry, will not pay. Pride and the habit of dominion may hold out long against this result, just as a strong swimmer will struggle in the current of a deep river; but it must succumb at length. Commercially speaking, the chief end of man is to succeed. The first duty of a system or an enterprise which seeks to maintain itself before the world is to show a balance in hand. The laws of political economy are inexorable. They may be propitiated, as Carthage propitiated her idols, by the blood of human victims; by the sacrifice of a race, as the Africans, or of a class, as the Sand-hillers and mean whites generally. But the time will come when the expiatory virtue ceases, and the law must have its way. The loss in the market valuation of slave property is a gauge of the advance already made towards a crisis that will engulf the whole system of slavery itself. That loss, in the present war, by a mild estimate, is set down at a thousand millions of dollars.

The economics of slavery require that the responsibility and cost of the laborer's maintenance should be thrown upon the master. This may be said in extenuation of it, that it includes the two great social functions of a poor-law and a municipal police. Slavery excludes pauperism, but it includes the drawback and burden which we cover with the name of pauperism. As soon as the peculiar system of industry which it supports ceases to pay commercially, the whole problem of pauperism rushes back in an aggravated form. Not out of pure humanity, and not out of a love of power in the abstract, will the masters endure the burden long. They must VOL. LXXIII. - 5TH S. VOL. XI. NO. I.

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forsake the ruined plantations and the half-barbaric populations out of which they once made their wealth. The desertion of Port Royal, with its surrounding territory of sea-island estates, the glory and the paradise of slavery as a system of productive industry, is only a single case, convulsive in its suddenness, and conspicuous on the tragic stage where it was exhibited, of what must take place hereafter, on an infinitely larger scale, in the long, lingering, chronic decay that is already preying upon it.

The disintegrating shock of war, as of galvanism in an imperfectly organized substance, thus delivers the system over to the more rapid operation of natural forces, which had been in some measure kept at bay. As in a decaying organism we are at liberty to watch the free play of those chemical affinities which rule brute matter, so in the dissolving framework of society we view unchecked the working out of those natural laws of climate and race which make the study of mankind one of the natural sciences. Just as we descend in the scale from a more highly organized form of society to a lower, human liberty disappears, and we are reduced to the conditions of elemental life; and results which might take generations to accomplish are crowded into the narrow space of years and decades.

In a state of slavery, the relations of the races are prescribed, rudely, but energetically, by political and municipal law. So long as the governing race maintains its absolute dominance, in virtue of superior civilization, or favoring circumstances, or nobler blood, it can safely modify that law, mitigate its injustice, and forestall by wise provisions the perils that menace the future. When that control is lost, we must fall back on wild nature. It is not a cheering view to take, but it is one which we must take, if we would deal honestly and wisely with the problem before us at all. The laws and characteristics of race must be studied scientifically, -not in the light of political theories or philanthropic sentiments or moral maxims, but in the dry light of facts. We conceive that our moralists and reformers have done much mischief, oftentimes, by failing to see facts and tendencies, which are as clear to the ethnologist as the laws of growth in

plants, or the classification of animals. In all our speculations on the subject, we have got to deal with the existence on our soil of very large numbers of a race widely alien from our own in many features which most sharply discriminate the families of mankind. The theory which some have held, of an intermediate race, to grow out of the blending of black and white, a theory which greatly damages the otherwise admirable argument of Mr. Helps, is instantly set aside, in our view, by three considerations: 1. The great numbers and widely separate characteristics of the two races respectively; 2. The tendency, of which all naturalists are aware, of races to revert to the purity of the original type, rather than permanently adopt varieties introduced by cross-breeding; 3. The fact that in a state of freedom this tendency is hastened and confirmed, not abolished. The phenomenon of "amalgamation" is an evidence of constraint, not a token of liberty.

We consider, therefore, that we are justified in assuming a more distinct and uncontrolled operation of the natural laws of climate and race in the future than in the past. Certainly it is so when we are tracing the results of the dissolution or decay of any given order of society. We think, then, that a time is rapidly approaching, and is greatly hastened by the outbreak of this war, when the population of the South will be distributed, and its relations inter se established, in nearer accordance with ethnological laws than heretofore. With a physical map of the continent before him, which should mark the lines of heat and moisture, the elevation of the surface and the qualities of the soil, a skilful ethnologist would be able to shade off, with tolerably accuracy, the locality of the colored population of the country, as it will be say fifty years. hence. This has already been done in fact, empirically, in maps shaded according to the figures of the census; but we have no question that Professor Agassiz could prepare one, prospectively, far more delicate and true in its indications. The general fact we state has been illustrated in various ways, both in politics and in hygiene. That promontory of high land, reaching from Maryland as far as Alabama, traced broadly by the Alleghany range, is a region providentially and incorrigibly loyal, sundering like a wedge the lowland

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belts of Secessiondom.* In other words, its elevation is above the habitat of the negro race. Again, while a valiant and venturous population of refugees crowds northward, to reach a land of secure freedom, and while many of them have maintained a very honorable position in the higher latitudes, many of them, we are told, especially women, more liable to climatic influences, are compelled to return southward; and in New England the colored population is barely kept stationary by a slow constant immigration. We do not wish to insist too much upon these facts; but they certainly seem to point to a distribution of races on our soil, in closer harmony with the laws of climate and race than now. And, if the tendency should be followed out, there would result what some of our ablest statesmen have long foreseen, a belt of population of purely African type, fringing the gulf-coasts, the low, hot valleys, and semitropical marsh-lands of the South, a race dominant in those localities, and verging, by shaded boundaries, toward the uplands and the North.

Some such vision as this is the terror of some, the stern, scientific belief of many others. To avert it, as if it were a calamity of the darkest dye, the specifics are two, - a tropical slave-empire, such as the South has struck for in the present war, which should dictate the social subjugation of the blacks as imperiously as England dictates that of the native races in Australia and Bengal; and the wholesale colonization of the African race, beyond the limits of the American republic.

As to the first, we think it far the more plausible; and we are inclined to give Southern statesmen credit for considerable sagacity and ability, as well as boldness, in making so desperate a stroke for it. But it was a scheme born of the most ruthless tyranny, full of mischief and terror to humanity at large, as well as to the victim-race; and we are justified in considering that the events of this war have put it quite beyond the range of possibility.

As to the scheme of colonization, the panacea of so many

* See the valuable pamphlet on "The Effect of Secession upon the Commercial Relations between the North and South," already noticed in our pages.

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