curse.

Negroes were first taken over to America because the white man could
not work under the tropical heats, and because the native Indian
would not work. The latter people has been, or soon will be,
exterminated--polished off the face of creation, as the Americans
say--which fate must, I should say, in the long run attend all non-
working people. As the soil of the world is required for increasing
population, the non-working people must go. And so the Indians have
gone. The negroes, under compulsion, did work, and work well; and
under their hands vast regions of the western tropics became fertile
gardens. The fact that they were carried up into northern regions
which from their nature did not require such aid, that slavery
prevailed in New York and Massachusetts, does not militate against
my argument. The exact limits of any great movement will not be
bounded by its purpose. The heated wax which you drop on your
letter spreads itself beyond the necessities of your seal. That
these negroes would not have come to the Western World without
compulsion, or having come, would not have worked without
compulsion, is, I imagine, acknowledged by all. That they have
multiplied in the Western World and have there become a race
happier, at any rate in all the circumstances of their life, than
their still untamed kinsmen in Africa, must also be acknowledged.
Who, then, can dare to wish that all that has been done by the negro
immigration should have remained undone?

The name of slave is odious to me. If I know myself I would not own
a negro though he could sweat gold on my behoof. I glory in that
bold leap in the dark which England took with regard to her own West
Indian slaves. But I do not see the less clearly the difficulty of