their strong argument, without ever estimating the vast dissimilarity of circumstances between the North and the South.

In the fifteen free states and territories of the American Union, containing a population of 9,557,055 whites, there are only 172,892 people of colour; that, at the time the abolition of slavery took place in these states, but a small fraction of that number existed, and their labour had become comparatively profitless. How altered is the case now! In the fifteen slave states and territories, with a white population of 4,632,053, there are 2,701,566 blacks, being 385,540 more than half of all the white population of those states. This was the population of the United States in 1840, and at present the blacks of those states are more than three millions. Let us, then, strain a supposition that it was to the interest of all concerned that these three millions of people should be manumitted and turned over to the Colonization Society8 to be sent home to Africa: it would require ten thousand of the largest class merchant [420] ships, supposing each to transport 300 souls, and $150,000,000, allowing the moderate expense of fifty dollars each to collect them together and transport them across the Atlantic Ocean. This is an amount entirely hopeless even to the most zealous infatuist. Again, let us allow, as we know to be the case, that it is not the interest of those concerned to give up this large amount of property without a just remuneration; yet it cannot be expected that the government should undertake to pay this remuneration, which, at their present value of $300 each, would require $900,000,000 in addition to the $150,000,000 necessary to carry them to Africa: an amount which the wise will not contemplate, and which the ignorant cannot estimate.

We will again suppose that the government had both the will and the credit to create a par stock to the amount of the purchase of this property: is it fair to presume that the owners ever would consent thereto, unless the immediate cash outlay of the $150,000,000 for their transportation was incurred?

Experience, the wisest of teachers, in recurring to the past and present condition of the free coloured population of the United States, has given an unequivocal negative to this inquiry. There are, in proportion to the number, seven times as many deaf and dumb, blind, insane, and idiots among the free coloured population of the Northern States as among the slaves of the South.9 This fact, united with the startling disproportion of crime among the former [421] over the latter, would forever prevent the abolition of slavery, when the emancipated slave is to sit down by the side of his late master in the enjoyment of the same political rights, to create nurseries of vice and misery. That the two colours can occupy the same country without degradation attaching to the one in a greater degree than to the other is supremely absurd. The degraded cast, deprived of the honours and emoluments of office, and feeling their unequal station in