s taxed to defray the expenses of twenty-five representatives of
Southern property in Congress, and to maintain an army mainly for the
protection of the slave-master against the dangerous tendencies of that
property.

In the early and better days of the Roman Republic, the ancient warriors
and statesmen cultivated their fields with their own hands; but so soon
as their agriculture was left to the slaves, it visibly declined, the
once fertile fields became pastures, and the inhabitants of that garden
of the world were dependent upon foreign nations for the necessaries of
life. The beautiful villages, once peopled by free contented laborers,
became tenantless, and, over the waste of solitude, we see, here and
there, at weary distances, the palaces of the master, contrasting
painfully with the wretched cottages and subterranean cells of the slave.
In speaking of the extraordinary fertility of the soil in the early times
of the Republic, Pliny inquires, "What was the cause of these abundant
harvests? It was this, that men of rank employed themselves in the
culture of the fields; whereas now it is left to wretches loaded with
fetters, who carry in their countenances the shameful evidence of their
slavery."

And what was true in the days of the Roman is now written legibly upon
the soil of your own Virginia. A traveller in your state, in
contemplating the decline of its agriculture, has justly remarked that,
"if the miserable condition of the negro had left his mind for
reflection, he would laugh in his chains to see how slavery has stricken
the land with ugliness."

Is the rapid increase of a population of slaves in itself no evil? In
all the slave states the increase of the slaves is vastly more rapid than
that of the whites or free blacks. When we recollect that they are under
no natural or moral restraint, careless of providing food or clothing for
themselves or their children; when, too, we consider that they are raised
as an article of profitable traffic, like the cattle of New England and
the hogs of Kentucky; that it is a matter of interest, of dollars and
cents, to the master that they should multiply as fast as possible, there
is surely nothing at all surprising in the increase of their numbers.
Would to heaven there were also nothing alarming!

7. Because, by the terms of the national compact, the free and the slave
states are alike involved in the guilt of maintaining slavery, and the
citizens of the for