250 
CONCLUDING BEMAKK8. 
" If herded together in military villages, and fed on 
rations gratuitously distributed, rum, dirt, and disease 
would devour them off the face of the earth in a few years. 
With peace established they would return, in ninety-five 
cases out of the hundred, to their old plantations, and work 
for their old masters. 
" The value of the slaves before the war was two 
thousand million dollars. This is all gone. Still the 
negro's labor remains ; and with this, and such European 
labor as will be imported, and such Northern labor as must 
flow South, the profits of the Southern staples will not be 
long in restoring material prosperity. 
" The negro, in his freedom, will not make more than 
six bales of cotton per year. Under the old system of 
labor he made ten. But the price has more than doubled, 
and his labor now must yield a large profit. 
" The land will not pass to any great extent from its 
former proprietors. They will lease it for a few years to 
men with capital, and then resume working it themselves, 
or sell portions of it with the same object, not materially 
decreasing their own possessions. 
" When the country is quiet, and the profits of the 
crops come to be known, there will be a rush Southward 
fi:om the sterile New England regions, and from Europe, 
only equalled by that to California on the discovery of 
gold. Men will not stay in the mountains of Vermont 
and New Hampshire, cultivating little farms of from fifty 
to a hundred acres, only yielding them some few hundreds 
a year profit for incessant toil, when the rich lands of the 
South, under skies as warm and blue as those of Italy, and 
with an atmosphere as exhilarating as that of France, are 
thrown open at from a dollar and a half to three dollars 
per acre. [Rather too low an estimate at this time. Say 
