in the United States in Fifty Years. 109 



in favour of slavery, have struck their roots the deeper for the rudeness 

 with which they have been assailed. The slave himself, too, has 

 suffered by the change. The progressive amelioration of his condi- 

 tion has been arrested ; and in the precautions which the schemes 

 of abolitionists (whose numbers have been as much overrated by 

 the slave-owners as their power has been by themselves,) have sug- 

 gested, his condition has, in some instances, become positively worse. 

 Even where this has not been the case the " bliss of ignorance" 

 has been converted by his misguided friends into a sullen and 

 hopeless discontent. The irritating conflicts and recriminations to 

 which the subject has given occasion between different parts of 

 the Union, have afforded new means of gaining popular favour, 

 which crafty politicians on both sides have gladly seized ; and the 

 dissensions thus inflamed, induce those who look with evil eyes on 

 the future strength and greatness of this republican confederacy, to 

 indulge in vain hopes of its dissolution. 



The causes of this strife of feeling and opinion are too deeply 

 seated in the human heart not to be supposed to continue for the 

 period that has been mentioned ; and, accordingly, the State of 

 domestic slavery, and the progress of the slave population, will 

 probably experience no material change for forty or fifty years, or 

 even a yet longer term, in any of the slaveholding States, except 

 Delaware, and perhaps Maryland. 



But if we carry our views to a yet more distant future, we shall 

 find causes at work whose effects on this institution neither the 

 miscalculating sympathies of fanaticism or philanthropy, nor their 

 re-action on the slave owners, can avert or long delay. The popu- 

 lation of the slaveholding States, at its present rate of increase, and 

 even at a reduced rate, will, in no long time, have reached that 

 moderate degree of density which supposes all their most produc- 

 tive lands taken into cultivation. As soon as that point is reached,* 

 the price of labour, compared with the means of subsistence, wijl 

 begin to fall, according to the great law of human destiny, so ably 

 developed by Malthus, and which is the inevitable result of man's 

 tendency to increase and multiply ; of his dependence on the soil 

 for his subsistence; and of the limited extent of that soil. Labour, 

 then, as it increases in quantity, must exchange either for less o<* 

 for cheaper food ; and such reduction is altogether independent of 

 a gradation of soils. It must take place if every rood of earth was 

 of equal fertility with the American Bottom in Illinois, since everyi 

 succeeding generation being more numerous than the preceding, 



10 



