e history of the world, whose _names_ at least may stand for ideal
legislators; but think of legislating to _regulate_ the breeding of
slaves, or the exportation of tobacco! What have divine legislators to
do with the exportation or the importation of tobacco? what humane ones
with the breeding of slaves? Suppose you were to submit the question to
any son of God,--and has He no children in the nineteenth century? is it
a family which is extinct?--in what condition would you get it again?
What shall a State like Virginia say for itself at the last day, in
which these have been the principal, the staple productions? What ground
is there for patriotism in such a State? I derive my facts from
statistical tables which the States themselves have published.

A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and
makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I saw, the other day, a
vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of
rags, juniper-berries, and bitter almonds were strewn along the shore.
It seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between
Leghorn and New York for the sake of a cargo of juniper-berries and
bitter almonds. America sending to the Old World for her bitters! Is not
the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life
go down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and
there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are
so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely
this kind of interchange and activity,--the activity of flies about a
molasses-hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And
very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.

Lieutenant Herndon, whom our Government sent to explore the Amazon, and,
it is said, to extend the area of Slavery, observed that there was
wanting there "an industrious and active population, who know what the
comforts of life are, and who have artificial wants to draw out the
great resources of the country." But what are the "artificial wants" to
be encouraged? Not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of,
I believe, his native Virginia, nor the ice and granite and other
material wealth of our native New England; nor are "the great resources
of a country" that fertility or barrenness of soil which produces these.
The chief want, in every State that I have been into, was a high and
earnest purpose in its inhabitant