the labor-forces of his children, what is there, I ask, abnormous in the claim of a man, who, with or without the sanction of state laws, has raised and trained a laborer from childhood at considerable expense and trouble, to his labor-force, being besides obliged to support him in all emergencies through life! Nothing can be plainer than that this claim is property, which ought to be protected by all governments.

With our bound labor system, land or soil, as mentioned, has nothing to do, as little as land has to do with shoemaking and spinning. It is a PERSONAL condition, something like that of a child relative to its parents. The condition of the Russian serfs and European subjects in general, depends, however, upon territorial rights. Free soil politics is an imported European article (as the whole Abolition agitation). If the Englishmen and Russians, etc., wish to become independent and self-governing men, they must first remove these territorial feudal rights; that is, they must cry for "free soil." This, of course, will bring down the royal and imperial landed crown-rights.

Up to this time Englishmen and Russians are property, and judged, and taxed, and sold as such with the land to which they belong. Whole provinces are accordingly acquired and disposed of, or conquered, while the soil in South Carolina is just as free as that in Massachusetts, Kansas, and Utah. Our bound laborers are not attached to dominions or soil (glebæ adscripti) like the European subjects and serfs. Our society is at present composed of the same elements as at the time when the constitution was made. People in the northern region, abundantly supplied with labor-force by immigration, found the risk of bound labor too great, and therefore sold their interest in it to the South. The same will happen under similar circumstances again and everywhere. Slavery is transient, liberty permanent. The free-soil talk can in a sensible American, who knows the difference between his country and Europe, only excite ridicule; for a little thinking must convince him that our bound labor is a mere personal condition or obligation recognized by State laws.

This is the reason why our bound labor system has, if well managed, not that deteriorating influence upon the culture of the land, as the European territorial subject and serf system. This is the reason why Russia begins in the thickly-settled, best-culti

vated provinces, to abolish serfdom. It is profitless there. A European seigneur must see how he can get along with his manorborn subjects-the American master is at liberty to improve or dispose of his bound laborers as he pleases. The labor of our four million slaves is more profitable to society at large than the free labor of ten million people in Spain and Portugal. The world can go along without the latter very well, but can not exist conveniently without our cotton.

Good governments adjust accurately the laws to the actual exigencies and conditions of society, while bad governments supplant their visions and schemes, and let slide these conditions, and ruin society-vide Jamaica.

There are still very few real free men in our northern states, as is proved by the immense number of laws, lawyers, judges, legislators, etc.-for these are not required by real free men, as St. Paul says. There are still fewer such men in Europe, as the general state of subjection and bondage there proves. Almost all Europeans are subject, or matter, possessed by princes according to the laws of inheritance. Capt. Ingraham rescued a man from the grasp of his imperial owner, who will resign his property-rights as unwillingly as the English king did to the captured naturalized British-Americans in 1812, claiming that they never had ceased to be his property. Rights by inheritance are property-rights-nothing else. The British government and the subjects, dukes and counts included, partake thus of the character of matter.

These peculiar conditions of society in England explain why the English government is at present, in favor of slave abolition, since by this process it changes men into landed feudal crownproperty, who priorly were the personal property of masters, and why, the queen, the lords, dukes, and the whole aristocracy, seem to favor this change, because all the privileged classes remain there as before, elevated and distanced from the new low crown-subjects. But let us see how such a change would operate with us. Our society differs in this regard entirely from that in Europe. When, with us, bound labor is abolished in the true sense of this word, all subjection is at an end; the freed bound servants stand upon the same platform with their prior masters; they acquire all political rights, and there being, in a great many districts, more slaves than

masters, the latter would be, with their families, in the minority, and, of course, ruled by the majority, the liberated Africans. Thus, by abolition, society in the slave states would be Africanized.

What do you think of such a society, my children?

Would you like to live in a town, ruled by Africans, or per chance, by Chinese? Do you believe that the Duke of Sutherland with his lady would? I for one never could believe it.

There is much confusion of notions abroad about that what is

tence.

called property in man. What I write in general on social affairs I take from nature and not from fancy and theories. The federal constitution, too, is organizing society as it naturally is. Society rests upon the idea of property. The child is the property of his parents, the father calls its mother his own, the wife claims her husband as her own. When sons and daughters break loose from the family they seek a new home, longing for the possession of beloved hearts and persons, also animals and vegetables exist by appropriating without ceremony what they need for their subsisEach must and will possess something. Industry is producing, man is accumulating by force of the desire to possess. A man of property is something, a loafer nothing. The patriarchal times are praised as the happiest, they were the period of full property in man. Who got disappointed in the possession of a wife or husband was an object of pity or ridicule. Most men prefer to be possessed by their governments (hereditary monarchs) to make them more stable and conservative. Look at France. Subordinate races submit without murmur to the dominion of superior races. Travellers report from Liberia that the emigrants fresh from the slave states are useful citizens, while free colored men from the free states are loafers. The possession of man is no slavery or barbarism, but the abuse of this possession. The father who claims his child as his property is no tyrant, but who maltreats it is. It is the same with a bound laborer. If treated right by a superior-raced man, this relation will make happy men. The main difference between monarchies and republics is that society or families cease to be possessed by the latter governments.

It is impossible that society in our southern states can exist in a state of civilization, that is, enjoyment of civil liberty, or real citizen rights, without keeping the Africans subject. There would be an end of social order and of subsistence by abolition. The

industry which supports society there, and contributes so much to the comfort and wealth of the world, would collapse at once; cotton, rice, sugar, tobacco, and other products of the southern climates, would disappear almost entirely from the market. Never have Africans in mass been better treated by any nation than by the Americans.

Again, my dear children, men and republics are more the work of circumstances than of philosophical systems, constitutions, and laws. The circumstances here in question are-first, savageness and slavery in Africa; secondly, domestication, the first step to the culture of Africans in America; thirdly, their gradual liberation, and, perhaps, reshipment to Liberia, etc. There is more providence in these circumstances for schooling and training savage men than party politicians are willing to admit. Of course, no one will believe that bound labor will exist a single day longer than it is required and profitable, just as free labor is never employed one minute longer than it is profitable and needed. To control all these circumstances is the business of those who are surrounded by them, and of nobody else.

The personal character of our bound labor system has many qualities which make it preferable to the European subject and serf system. First, it allows an easy combination with free labor. There are 250,000 free colored laborers in the southern states, according to the census. Secondly, it facilitates manumission. About 4,000 bound laborers are without interference of states annually emancipated in our country. They now begin to spread civilization in Africa. Thirdly, our bound laborers may be easily transplanted to regions mere apt to their labor, and improved by travelling. The tampering with bound laborers, when travelling with their masters abroad, by busy-bodies, has cut off this source of labor-culture, to the great disadvantage of the bound laborer. A real abolitionist should cheerfully open his house, and city, and state to the masters with their bound laborers, to give the latter a better chance than that at home of comparing their situation with that of free servants and laborers. But it is in vain to expect such just and generous dealing with bound laborers from the side of English "pecora imitationis" in Boston and elsewhere. Nothing would promote more voluntary manumission than a fraternal, upright, gentleman-like intercourse between our fellow-citizens North and

South, and a stoppage of that clumsy English abolition and freesoil party movement whose greatest triumph consists in robbery, by seducing a bound servant to become faithless to his master.

Migration of bound laborers from place to place, or state to state, does not increase the number of slaves, of course. Slavery is a product of circumstances, just as liberty. Abstract notions never make a man free. Our world exhibits a social "tableau” of slaves, serfs, subjects, and a very, very few free men, comparatively. The policy of prohibiting, instead of regulating the importation of slaves or savage Africans to Europe or America, for domestication, is from a mundane view, still debatable.* Without transplanting these Africans to America or Europe and domesticating them, no culture will ever take hold on them. Neither Greek nor Roman local influence has altered Africa. I have not the least faith in the humanitarian efforts and successes of the French corporals and generals on this terrain. In the United States begins a new African history—that of African industry. Asia has been slave before, and remains stave after the introduc

*The following passage is from the London Times, of July, 1858. This letter was written 1856 :

"All this time, on the pretence of preventing the passage of slaves, we are actually preventing that free passage which undoubtedly would arise but for our interference, and which is the very thing wanted both for Africa and the West Indies. The best thing that could happen would be a spontaneous, though encouraged, assisted, and regulated emigration of negroes from Africa to the fields of labor and enterprise on the opposite shore. The African would go across, learn to work, live as well, save money, and return a wealthy and comparatively civilized man, and would become the means of civilizing his countrymen at home. Ile would bring back to Africa not only the money, but the industry and arts of his employers; and he would retain at home the new wants he had acquired in his period of service. The benefits of the West Indies are too obvious to enlarge upon, and all we have to observe is, that we don't think our countrymen and our possessions in that part of the world utterly undeserving of consideration.

"What we have described may not be a lofty principle, but it is something better and safer; it is the right course of nature, and the way in which mankind has hitherto been civilized. But it is prevented by the effort to which national pride has now committed us. We interpose our wooden walls between the vast reservoir of African labor and the channels of industry and civilization into which it is ready to run. Of course we are prepared to find any number of English politicians ready to maintain this or any other national hypocrisy. Such diseases must run their course, even if the climax should happen to be a severe one."