eparation of Irish families
and sundered more domestic ties within the last ten years than African
slavery has effected since its introduction into the United States."
England keeps 100,000 soldiers, a large navy, and innumerable police to
secure obedience to her social institutions, and physical force is the
only guarantee of her social order, the only cement of her gigantic
empire. The laws restrain the abuses and punish the crimes of the slave
system. Slavery is impossible in England and Europe, because wages have
gone down to a point where they are barely sufficient to support the
laborer and his family. Capital could not afford to own labor. Slavery
ceased in England in obedience to this law, and not from any regard to
liberty and humanity.

Senator Toombs declared that the condition of the African might not be
permanent among us. He might find his exodus in the unvarying law of
population. Increase of population may supply to slavery its euthanasia
in the general prostration of all labor. The emancipation of the negro
in the West Indies had not made him a more useful or productive member
of society. The slave States, with one-half the white population, and
between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000 slaves, furnish three-fifths of the
annual product of the republic. In this relation, the labor of the
country is united with and protected by its capital, directed by the
educated and intelligent.

Senator Toombs combated the idea that slavery debased and enervated the
white man. To the Hebrew race were committed the orders of the Most
High. Slaveholding priests ministered at their altars. Greece and Rome
afforded the highest forms of civilization. Domestic slavery neither
enfeebles nor deteriorates a race. Burke had declared that the people of
the Southern colonies of America were much more strongly, and with a
higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty that those to the
Northward. Such were our Gothic ancestors; such were the Poles; such
will be all masters of slaves who are not slaves themselves. In such a
people the haughtiness of domination combines itself with the spirit of
freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.

Senator Toombs declared that, in the great agitation which for thirty
years had shaken the national government to its foundation and burst
the bonds of Christian unity among the churches, the slaveholding States
have scarcely felt the shock. Stability, progress, order, peace,
content, prospe