30 THE NEW AGRICULTURE, 



than in all my life before. Ours is the greatest country, and this 

 is the greatest people on the face of the earth. England, France, 

 Germany and all the other nations of Europe are as old men, their 

 energies exhausted, their resources largely wasted, and their possi- 

 bilities thoroughly tested. There is more of gold and silver and 

 of precious stones in our great American desert, than in all of the 

 countries of the Old World, and among the hills, along the plains, 

 and in the valleys of the Rocky Mountain and Sierra Nevada and 

 Coast Ranges, and along the Pacific slope, are found greater possi- 

 bilities as regards population and production than in all of the 

 older sections of our own country, or, in fact, any other portion of 

 our globe. I want to tell you about those big trees, and all of the 

 other big and little things I have seen since I have been gone. I 

 will only say now that Sumner had it right. We ought to buy the 

 slaves of their masters and pay for them, if to do this, as Sum- 

 ner says, it becomes necessary to build a bridge of gold over which 

 these bondsmen may cross in reaching a land of liberty. We can 

 afford to build it. There is money enough in the mines of Cali- 

 fornia now being dug out to buy the whole South, lands, cotton, 

 corn, slaves and slaveholders, and colonize them all in Africa to- 

 gether, or somewhere else, if need be. But colonization is a fraud, 

 a delusion and a snare. There is work enough, and will be found 

 wages enough, for all sorts of workers inside the boundaries of 

 what has been denominated the great American desert, to employ 

 an hundred millions of white and black men alike. It's all a lie, 

 that because people are black they will not work. Who built the 

 pyramids ? Who the Chinese wall ? Who was Hannibal ? 



" The Egyptians were no more a white people four thousand years 

 ago than now. I tell you the Carthagenians had no more physical 

 and intellectual power three thousand years ago than have the 

 Nubians and Abyssinians of to-day. This whole thing of black and 



