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 crop
of cotton is worth, at current prices, nearly a thousand millions, or
twice the debt contracted for the war,--impair our national strength by
destroying the sources of supply? At least one crop has been lost, and
this will for a term of years insure high prices.
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