free.

It is the opinion of some French anti-slavery writers that the _engages_
might have tilled the soil of Hayti to this day, if they had labored for
themselves alone. This is doubtful; the white man can work in almost
every region of the Southern States, but he cannot raise cotton and
sugar upon those scorching plains. It is not essential for the support
of an anti-slavery argument to suppose that he can. Nor is it of any
consequence, so far as the question of free-labor is concerned, either
to affirm or to deny that the white man can raise cotton in Georgia or
sugar in Louisiana. The blacks themselves, bred to the soil and wonted
to its products, will organize free-labor there, and not a white man
need stir his pen or his hoe to solve the problem.

At first it seems as if the letters-patent of Louis XV. were inspired by
some new doctrine of free-trade. And he did cherish the conviction that
in the matter of the slave-trade it was preferable to a monopoly; but
his motive sprang from the powerful competition of England and Holland,
which the Guinea Company faced profitably only while the War of
Succession secured to it the _asiento_. The convention of merchants
which Louis XIV. called in Paris, during the year 1701, blamed
monopolies in the address which it drew up, and declared freedom of
trade to be more beneficial to the State; but this was partly because
the Guinea Company arbitrarily fixed the price of slaves too high, and
carried too few to the colonies.

So a free-trade in negroes became at last a national necessity. Various
companies, however, continued to hold or to procure trading privileges,
as the merchants were not restrained from engaging in commerce in such
ways as they preferred. The Cape-Verde, the South-Sea, the Mississippi
or Louisiana, and the San-Domingo Companies tried their fortunes still.
But they were all displaced, and free-trade itself was swallowed up, by
the union of all the French Antilles under the great West-India Company
of 1716. This was hardly done before the Government discovered that the
supply of negroes was again diminishing, partly because so extensive a
company could not undertake the peculiar risks and expenses of a traffic
in slaves. So in the matter of negroes alone trade was once more
declared free in 1741, burdened only with a certain tax upon every slave
imported.

At this time the cultivation of sugar alone in the principal French
islands consumed all the slaves who