[ Mep. No. 564. ] 49 
and to avail ourselves, even in tropical agriculture, of the voluntary labor 
of our white citizens alone. 
As, then, the withdrawal of European skill, capital, and force, from the 
negro labor of the neighboring portions of the torrid zone, will diminish so 
greatly the agricultural production of tropical staples for exportation, it 
has become absolutely necessary to employ American skill, capital, and 
force, on the negro labor of certain portions of our own territory, to create 
an equivalent supply of cultivated tropical products for the home con¬ 
sumption of the United States. 
The profitableness of cultivating tropical staples for the foreign market, 
may be shown with the facts of the immense superiority of our people 
and of our institutions over those, of the torrid zone. Our population is 
composed of the best varieties of the best species of the human genus, 
combining all the moral and intellectual improvement of the most civilized 
nations of Europe. Our Government is the best in the world, because it 
is the Government of a most moral, industrious, enlightened, and enter¬ 
prising people. On the contrary, the best colored species of the torrid zone 
are inferior to the worst varieties of the white species of the temperate 
zone, in the capacities as well as in the desires, of improving their individ¬ 
ual and social condition. Their varied ^/izk-governments are the natural 
results of an indolent, ignorant, immoral, imbecile, and, consequently, poor 
population. Possessing very few personal desires and very little political 
protection, scarcely any skill and rarely any capital, however abundant 
may be the free laborers, and however cheap the free labor, their agri¬ 
cultural products must continue to be scanty and dear. Even in the nom¬ 
inal republics of tropical America, the agriculture of their Indian citizens 
very rarely affords an adequate supply for their limited domestic market, 
or even for their scanty personal consumption alone ; and the future un¬ 
productiveness of the free negro subjects of the British islands, may be in¬ 
ferred from the actual desolation of St. Domingo. Our only rivals, then, 
in the cultivation of tropical productions for the foreign market, will be 
the colonies in which slave labor may remain combined with European 
skill and capital. Of these, the most formidable is the island of Cuba; and 
yet, her population. and Government are greatly inferior to those of the 
United States for prosperous agriculture. The Spanish .variety of the 
white species of mankind is notorious for the numerous defects of the na¬ 
tional character, institutions, and even religion of the individuals who com¬ 
pose it, on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. The disadvantages for profit¬ 
able production common to all colonial establishments hence increase, 
both in number,and weight, in a Spanish colony. The innumerable tax¬ 
ations of most Catholic despotism, on the time and money of its subjects, 
rival, in abusive oppression, the numerous exactions of most Catholic su¬ 
perstition on the purse and pursuits of its professors. But independently 
of every other consideration, the exemption of the American planter from 
• the heavy duties paid by colonial planters on the extra-tropical productions 
of the United States, consumed by their laborers, will enable the former 
to furnish tropical productions much cheaper for the European market. 
-Even undp the disadvantages of soil and climate in our Atlantic Southern 
States,,their actual cultivated productions of the tropics, their rice, tobacco, 
and cotton, are profitably exported to every portion of the torrid zone it- 
vself, in spite of heavy duties and prohibitory laws; and it may be confi 
