of cotton in the
Southern States will receive the impetus to a magnificent development.
The emancipated negroes make large quantities of sugar in the Antilles;
why should they not make cotton on firm ground? If affranchisement
produced the destruction of planting in St. Domingo, we know now the
reason. It is a proved fact that negroes who do not owe their liberty to
insurrection, remain disposed to devote themselves to labor in the
fields.

With slavery, observe, disappear, one after the other, the obstacles in
the way of agricultural progress. The capital which no one dares risk
to-day in the Southern States, will flow into them emulously as soon as
slavery shall be abolished; I say more: as soon as its progressive
abolition shall be no longer doubtful in the sight of all. European
immigration, the current of which turns aside with so much
circumspection, avoiding a territory accursed and given over to
calamities, will flock towards those countries more beautiful, more
fertile, and broader than those of the Far West. Machinery will come, to
more than fill up the void caused by the passing diminution of the
number of laborers. The slaves can be intrusted with none but the
simplest implements: every one knows that the plough, introduced
originally into our French colonies, disappeared to make room for the
hoe as soon as Colbert had authorized the slave trade. Ploughs have
reappeared there since emancipation. Their agricultural and industrial
progress date from the same epoch: to-day, our colonists understand the
use of manures, and make improvements in manufacture. A new era is
dawning, in fine; what will it be in the United States, among that
people which seems destined to surpass all others in the application of
mechanics to agriculture?

Still, I have made one concession too much in admitting the diminution
of the number of laborers. Supposing that a few negroes quit the field,
many whites will come to take their place. White labor is fully possible
in the majority of the slave States, and immigrants from Europe will not
hesitate to engage in it. Wherever slavery reigns, it is that, and not
the climate, that must be arraigned if the whites fold their hands;
labor has become there a servile act--it is blighted, as it were, in its
essence. A competent writer said the other day: "If Algeria had been
subjected to the sway of slavery, cultivation there would have been
reputed impracticable for the French, and examples o