10 But, Mr. Chairman, I am ashamed to argue the question on such a basis. The failure of West India emancipation! Do the gentleman and I speak the same language? Do I understand the gentleman, and does he understand him- self? Failure, when 800,000 human chattels were quietly changed in a day to men and women, endowed with the possession and care of their own bodies and souls, introduced to the relations of humanity, entitled to call their children their own, empowered to have husband and wife, brother and sister, in some intelligible sense! This a failure! And mark the decisive practical contradiction given, and forever sealed, to all that had been said, and nowhere more loudly than in these islands, of the danger of such a proceeding. Four hundred thousand negroes in Jamaica to forty thousand whites, the whites would have been but a mouthful for their vindictive maw, if vindictive passions had had sway. But not one act of violence sullied that magnificent triumph of Christianity and right; and, from that day to this, a peace and good order have prevailed, which would do honor to any civilized community. If that is a failure, will some one tell me what -would have been triumphant and glorious success? I should be glad to be informed. The idea has not yet dawned upon me. Once more: The gentleman took ground against the pretty common opinion that, as he expresses it, “the continuance of slavery is injurious to us as a nation,” (page 9.) He will excuse me for saying, that rarely has it been my chance to fall in with so palpable a non sequitur as that which lies in the chasm between his premises and his conclusion. “It may be remembered,” he said, “that the view derived from the decennial census is well calculated to deceive. More than one hundred thousand foreigners annually arrive in the United States, who settle down almost entirely in the free States.” Do they? And why? Because in the free States the occupation of the laborer does not place him in a degraded caste, and because in the free States there are common schools for him to send his children to, in which they can be trained under the same advantages as the richest, and from wrhich they can start in an equal competition with the sons of the richest for all the prizes of society. Nor only is this the case with foreigners. “ Those who emigrate from the old Northern States almost all go to the new free States; while, on the other, hand, a very large proportion of the emigration of the old Southern States goes into the free States of the Northwest.” Indeed? And what is it that sets the prodigious current of emigration so determinately in that direction, winning even the sons of the sunny South from the-homes of their childhood and the graves of their fathers, and all the associations of kindred and of memory, to seek the.hardships of an untried condition and a Northern sky? Just the intense desire for that equality and those social advantages which the presence of slavery absolutely excludes. “This, I have observed myself,” the gentleman continued, “is eminently true of the North Carolina emigrants; and I may add, too, that, but for this emigration, population would increase in that' State as fast as it would in any country, there being an abundant supply of the necessaries of life among the entire population.” Ah! Mr. Chairman, “much virtue is in” but, as well as in “if.” “But for this emigration,” North Carolina would rapidly increase. Because of this emigration, it does not so increase. And what causes this emigration? The gentleman told us what does not cause it. It is no want of a “supply of the necessaries of life,” vulgarly so called. Of them, he said truly, they have abundance—plenty to eat, drink, and wear. But of ,what are equally “necessaries of life” to right-minded people—equality of social position, and opportunities for personal improvement and advancement—the non-slaveholding North Carolinians have not enough, and therefore they go elsewhere in search of them, keeping down the population of the State, as well as its wealth and consequence, of which, in a well-organized community, the industrious classes are always the support and strength. This remark on the tendency of emigra- tioil to the free States, said the gentleman, is “eminently true of the North
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