108 Progress of Population and Wealth 



CHAPTER XIII. 



THE FUTURE PROGRESS OF SLAVERY. 



So far as can now be seen, the progress of the slave population 

 in the United States is likely to undergo but little change for several 

 decennial terms, and to be no more affected by schemes of emanci- 

 pation or colonization, or even by individual cases of manumission, 

 than it has been. 



This is not the place for assailing or defending slavery ; 

 but it may be confidently asserted, that the efforts of aboli- 

 tionists have hitherto made the people in the slaveholding States 

 cling to it more tenaciously. Those efforts are viewed by 

 them as an intermeddling in their domestic concerns that is equally 

 unwarranted by the comity due to sister States, and to the solemn 

 pledges of the federal compact. In the general indignation which 

 is thus excited, the arguments in favour of negro emancipation, once 

 open and urgent, have been completely silenced, and its advocates 

 among the slaveholders, who have not changed their sentiments, 

 find it prudent to conceal them. Philosophy no longer ventures to 

 teach that this institution is yet more injurious to the master than 

 the slave ; religion has ceased to refuse it her sanction ; and even 

 the love of liberty, which once pleaded for emancipation, is now 

 enlisted against it. Statesmen and scholars have tasked their 

 ingenuity to show that slavery is not only legitimate and moral, but 

 expedient and wise. The scheme of Las Casas, which, to relieve 

 Indians from the prospective yoke of bondage, actually placed it 

 on the necks of Africans, is no longer deemed a paralogism in 

 morals, and the slavery of a part of the community is gravely 

 maintained to be essential to a high State of civil freedom in the rest. 



Such have been the fruits of the zeal of northern abolitionists in 

 those States in which slavery prevails ; and the fable of the Wind 

 and the Sun never more forcibly illustrated the difference between 

 gentle and violent means in influencing men's wills. Nor is the 

 effect a temporary one. All the prejudices of education and habit 



