of Algerine sentiment for human rights, you are set free by
the government, and are enabled to possess a little farm of your own in
the African mountains. What would probably be your views as to the
economic duty of adding to that great benefaction to the human race, the
production of cotton? What would be your personal sentiments toward
cotton and all species of labor connected therewith? How, especially,
would you be apt to view the estate where you had spent so many
agreeable years, and the master for whom you had produced so
much without reward? Fancy an effort on his part to _hire_
you,--possibly even at lower wages than other laborers receive, in view
of your many obligations to him!

It is barely possible that you might prefer even the small farm,--where
you were producing nothing but "pumpkin" for the world, to increasing
the exports of Algeria on the old property, under the same master and at
half-wages. For some years at least, the world's production would not
probably be greatly assisted by you. A certain degree of idleness would
have a charm for a time, even to an Anglo-American, after such an
experience.

What shall we say, then, of an inferior race, slave-born, ignorant, and
undisciplined by moral influences, placed suddenly in such new and
strange circumstances? Could we reasonably expect that they would at
once labor under freedom as they did under slavery? Could we demand that
the properties which had been sprinkled with the sweat of their
unrequited toil for so many years, which possibly had witnessed their
sufferings under nameless wrongs, where the tone even of the now
labor-paying landlord must have something of the old ring of the
slave-master,--that these should be cultivated as eagerly as their own
little farms by freed men? Especially could we ask it, if the masters
undertook to exercise their old sway over political economy, and paid
less wages than the market-rate, and even these with irregularity?
Should we be rightfully shocked, if the products of these large estates
even entirely failed through want of labor? What else could we expect?

Suppose, still further, as years went by, the former masters, all the
wealthy and powerful classes of society, united in discouraging the
improvement and opposing the general education of this, the lowest and
poorest class. What would be the almost certain result?

If we should hear that such an emancipation was an economic failure, we
should not be in