9 AUGUST 1856, Page 15

SELF-EXTINCTION OF THE $TA VE -TRADE.

No humane society can prevent people from drowning themselves if they are so inclined ; • no slave-trade prevention can prevent slave-trading if Whites will buy slaves and Blacks will be sold. Notwithstanding the grand adhesion of the Northern States of America to the Anti-Slavery alliance, we must still have very great doubt whether the Southern States will extinguish slavery or abandon slave-trading, unless there be an actual civil war in the Union, and the Southern States, as "sovereign republics," be absolutely destroyed—unless their present White population be ruined, their Black population largely slaughtered, and the territory recolonized from the North before readmission to the Union. The difficulty does not consist only in the obstinacy with which the Southern men may defend "a peceliae institution." It lies in the free will which renders men of a certain stamp prone to be purchasers of slaves, to be traders in slaves or to be the live commodity itself. There are some regions in the world at present which cannot be worked by White labour. At a later period, perhaps' mechanical aids may so economize the exertions of labour that Whites may perform it under a Tropical sun. The territories, again, may be so modified by the progress of agriculture under Black hands, that the atmosphere may be brought down to the endurance of the White. But these are processes of which at present we do not see the end. For our day, there are regions where none but the Negro can labour. The Negro in his natural state, however, declines to labour. The White demands hands which can work, and. he hungers for a supply ,of slaves. Africa produces the article in superabundance. African society is partly constructed upon the principle of devoting a surplus population to export. Here, then, is the will to buy, and there the will to sell. Since the Negro in his raw condition does not subvert the government on the one side which sells him, and . that on the other which holds him in slavery, we may say roughly that he is apt for that condition. Humanitarians statesmen, conformists in Christian morality, all agree that traffic must be prevented ; they establish laws, treaties, cruisers, customs regulations, harbourpolice, for its prevention,—in vain. While there is a market for the purchase and a field for the production of the article, and while commerce regulates its morals by the profit-and-loss account in the ledger, there will, we conceive, always be merchants prepared to carry on the traffic, and to reckon these impediments only as so many items in the charge.

The port of New York is notoriously frequented by vessels prepared to equip for the slave-trade. The authorities appear to be sincere in the desire to seize these vessels, when their character is established ; but the exigencies of maritime commerce the difficulty of carrying on an inquisitorial interference, the Republican jealousy of official meddling, all conspire to thwart the observance either of the Republican laws or of Anti-Slavery treaties. Englishmen as well as Americans engage in the traffic. Sailors are trepanned into it as they used to be kidnapped. by English pressgangs—only the splendid wages teach them to like it.

There is one mode of abolishing the slavery system, which might perhaps work out itself if all these laborious attempts at hinderance were abandoned—if the principle of free trade were extended to it, or rather -the principle of nonintervention. Let us suppose that the Slave States had their will in the fullest extent— freedom to grow, exchange and import herds of slaves as largely as they pleased. What would be the res alt ? The Free States might continue to keep out the dangerous convenience. The incidents of an over-population of uneducated Negroes in the Slave States would but strengthen the resolve of the Free States to;exelude that dangerous element, that element so incompatible with genuine Republican institutions. It is obvious that a producing population, which does not hold in its hands the means of commerce, cannot constitute a profitable class for any community. With unchecked increase, a surplus population would be allthe more dangerous, since it would be incapable of self-government. The experience of the slave-trade proves that the capacity of employing. Negro labour ceases at a certain point

in ; and commerce cannot crease proportionately with the increase

of the raw material of industry. But the Negroes could not be exported to the Free-States : there would be no help for it, then, but to take them back again—to reexport them to Africa. The Negro surplus of America would regurgitate upon the African soil ; and the Slave States would be driven perforce to adopt the Clay policy as a matter of self-defence, of relief for their own overloaded land. The African, incapable of self-government at home, incapable of learning any industry except by the process of slavery, would be conveyed, by the baser instruments of Providence embodied in the slave-trade, to a harsh school in Americo, and there fitted, perchance, to reintroduce that self-working industry with-which alone Africa can be civilized or the aborigines of that continent truly "converted." .'Perhaps no more effectual mode of extinguishing the slave-trade could be devised than that of creating a glut of slaves where at present there is a demand. for them. The idea is that of Las Cases reversed to his opponent, who was a citizen of Lubeck—' How can you contend for the being of a God if there were one, should I be here in Lubeck ? ' " Here is another general of those clays, just the opposite of the Frenchman.

"General Vegesack, a rough soldier of the old stamp, when some observations as to the future constitution of the cities were made in his presence, replied—' When I enter Hamburg, or Lubeck, I shall say to the people, 'Now, my children, thank God that you have got your freedom again, and govern yourselves according to your laws. Where is your old Burgomaster ? —where are your old Councillors? I will put them into their old places : if_you have heretofore had any foolery among you, be the wiser on that account for the future. I know neither the blockheads nor the foxes, but you must know them • I can't trouble myself about nothing. Not a word of constitutional changes ! I can hear nothing of the sort. I bring you back your old laws, and will do what my master commands me.' "