ys been
in a servile condition. In Hayti and Jamaica experiments had been tried
of freeing them, under the auspices of France and England. Miseries had
resulted and ruin overwhelmed the islands. "Fanaticism may palliate, but
could not conceal the utter prostration of the race." The best specimens
of the race were to be found in the Southern States, in closest contact
with slavery. The North does not want the negro, does not encourage his
immigration. The great fact of the inferiority of the race is admitted
everywhere in our country.

"Our political system gives the slave great and valuable rights. His
life is protected; his person secured from assault against all others
except his master, and his master's power in this respect is placed
under salutary legal restriction." He gets a home, ample clothing and
food, and is exempted from excessive labor. When no longer capable of
labor, from age or disease, he is a legal charge upon his master. The
Southern slave, he said, is a larger consumer of animal food than any
population in Europe, and larger than any laboring population in the
United States, and their natural increase is equal to that of any other
people. Interest and humanity cooperate in harmony for the well-being of
slave labor. Labor is not deprived of its wages. Free labor is paid in
money, the representative of products; slave labor in the products
themselves. The agricultural and unskilled laborers of England fail to
earn the comforts of the Southern slave. The compensation of labor in
the Old World has been reduced to a point scarcely adequate to the
continuation of the race.

"One-half the lands of the cotton States is annually planted in food
crops. This half is consumed by the laborers and animals. The tenant in
the North does not realize so much."

Mr. Toombs believed that the Southern men were awakening to the
conviction that the slave should be taught to read and write, as being
of more use to himself, his master, and society. He realized that the
laws should protect marriage and other domestic ties, forbidding the
separation of families, and stated that some of the slaveholding States
had already adopted partial legislation for the removal of these evils.
But the necessities of life and the roving spirit of the white people
produced an infinitely greater amount of separation in families than
ever happened to the colored race. "The injustice and despotism of
England toward Ireland has produced more s