ocean and the daily alternations of the land and sea breeze.

On several occasions the employment of white labour has been attempted in Jamaica, but invariably with the same disastrous result. Besides, cotton is not the only product of the South; there are others of large importance-tobacco, sugar, rice. In South Carolina, at certain seasons of the year, such is the nature of the climate, that the planter, born and nurtured on the spot, is forced to leave home and fields for many months of the year. Around Charleston it is regarded as certain death to continue in the country even for one week during the summer season. Suppose such a district peopled with white labourers-could they remove, to reside in other air, for many months of the year, and what would become of the crop during their absence? And yet, in the midst of all this, the negro continues at his work, amidst the swamps, in perfect health. In Louisiana, the heat of the climate is aggravated by the process of sugarmaking to so great a degree, that the European can hardly endure to stand in the temperature in which the negro has to work; yet they rejoice in the juice of the cane, and are never more hearty than during the boiling season.

The plain truth is, and it is idle to attempt to argue it away, that the white man is the inhabitant and labourer of the temperate zone, and he would no more thrive if put to field labour amidst the canes of Louisiana, or the rice-swamps of Caro

lina, or the cotton lands of Mississippi or Alabama, than would the Bengalee, in the ice-harvest of the winter's cold of Massachusetts. Nature has allotted to each latitude a race suited to its climate, and we cannot reverse her laws. And whatever may be the speculations of visitors and theorists, this is beyond a doubt that there exists in the mind of the Southern planter a thorough conviction, that without negro labour his fields must go untilled, and he and his children come to want. With him, therefore, the question is more than one of mere profit, it is one of existence.

It is also one of property: a subject upon which, in every part of the world, and in none more so than in this country, human nature is susceptible and tenacious. And in this case it is no ordinary amount of property. The slaves of the Union have been valued as high as six hundred and fifty millions sterling, which appears excessive. But taking the number, which is by the last census four millions, at an average value of 600 dollars-a very low estimate in 1860-this would give a sum of five hundred millions of pounds sterling. And they who talk so readily of emancipation—who denounce the South so bitterly and impatiently— do they stop to consider what five hundred millions sterling really means? We emancipated our slaves at a cost of twenty millions, a trifle in comparison. Who is prepared to say that, to this very day, we should not have continued slave

owners, had it required five hundred millions to remove the evil? If we assume that payment of the full value might not be required, who is prepared to pay half, or a third, or a quarter of the sum? Is it proposed that the South, of its own magnanimity and virtue, should make the sacrifice? But when was such a sacrifice heard of, or recorded in the history of mankind? Men will make sacrifices under the impulse of their own strong convictions of duty; but in this case there is no more conviction of wrong than existed amongst our own West Indian proprietors; if possible, still less.

And the vast sum named is not all that is at stake. The value of real and personal estate, in the South, has been estimated as very nearly equal to that of the slaves; and by this rule, the landed property would considerably exceed two hundred millions. Now as the loss of slave labour would, in their belief, virtually annihilate all value in land, it is really as a question of seven hundred millions sterling that this subject presents itself to the Southern mind.

There is another result of the abolitionist agitation. The American of the Southern States is not entirely without the feelings of other men, It is well known that the most accomplished and refined of American society may be found there. They have contributed more than their share to all that has given lustre to the military history of their country, or the councils of its Senate. Of the names familiar to Europe, those of Washing

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ton, Jefferson, Madison, Munroe, Jackson, Marshall, Clay, Calhoun, Scott, and Maury, are all names of Southern men. No equal list can be produced out of the Northern ranks. Hence it is fair to suppose that a community of which such men were, or now are, citizens, is not so entirely barbarous as to be void of feelings common to the rest of mankind. If they do possess them, what must be the effect upon those feelings of a gnawing agitation, which not only aims at the destruction of their property, accompanied by the jeopardy of their existence, but which holds them up to scorn in the press, in the pulpit, in society, as men of no principle, of no humanity; which depicts them as monsters in novels, and denounces them as reprobates in sermons? Is any people to be found so utterly phlegmatic, as to be exposed to this year after year-to hear their own fellowcitizens rebuking them as criminal, and striving to destroy the system on which their property and existence depend, without being roused at last to some strong degree of impatience? And when we know that they are naturally a proud and sensitive race, we cannot but expect that these things have sunk deep into their minds.

The Southerner is conscious that the rising generation in the North is being educated to look upon him as one of a lower order of civilization: as a culprit and a sinner, whom it is a religious. duty to reclaim from the error of his ways, or to punish for his wickedness. Now if all this be

ever so true, it is not the less galling to the spirit of a powerful people. It was no part of the terms on which the sovereign States of the South entered into the federal compact, that others of the contracting States should assume a right of moral superiority, or adopt a practice of teaching and preaching against them. They simply continue what they were when the compact was framed; they act in the spirit and under the terms of the Constitution. They were slave-owners then, as we were-as the North was; they are so still. There was no bargain that one section should change its moral standard, and enforce its altered views upon another. Any American has a clear right to urge the abolition of Slavery in his own State, amongst his own people, and to use such form of persuasion as may seem best to him. But it becomes a very different thing when one section assumes this right against another section, each of them guaranteed by the Constitution, that its social polity shall stand intact, under the control of its own people. Hence this agitation not only embitters the feelings of the Southerner, but appears to him utterly unjust, as a direct violation of the whole scope and spirit of the federal compact.

There are also some passages of history that are deeply impressed upon the Southern mind. The insurrections that have several times occurred in America and in the West Indies, and the rising of the Blacks in Hayti, dwell constantly upon his memory; and when he reads some abolitionist