necessity, a very large majority of the free negroes remain in the Slave States, after emancipation. In the free North, it is only in the great cities that they can find occupation or a living-for there is no question that New York, Jersey City, and Philadelphia, contain some ninetenths of the coloured population in the States to which they respectively belong. New England seems to be unsuited for the negro race, probably from the length and severity of its winters. Ohio and Indiana owe the large numbers of their black population to the immediate proximity of the Slave States. And practically, either from natural causes or from adverse legislation, the North-western States afford no home for the free negro. Somehow or other, the climate, or the social conditions of the free North, are not favourable to the increase of the coloured race. In 1790, in the seven States of New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, in which at that period slavery existed, there were 40,370 slaves, to say nothing of free men of colour, while the white population numbered 1,452,828. In 1850, the free coloured population of these States, in which slavery had been gradually abolished, amounted to 139,206, while the white population had reached 6,909,826. Thus, while the whites in sixty years had more than quadrupled their numbers, the men of colour have increased little more than threefold.

It is a charge very commonly brought in England

against the Free States, that when they abolished slavery, they sold their slaves to the South. It is possible this may have been done in individual instances, but it is obvious that it cannot have been in any sense a State measure, from the fact that the census in every State shows an increase in the number of coloured people, in the years immediately succeeding the act of emancipation. The explanation, therefore, for the comparative unproductiveness of the negro race in the North, must be sought in natural causes. Poverty, hardship, and disease, have checked successfully the natural fertility of the race. Mr. Seward, in talking over this subject, told me that when he was a child in his father's house, there were as many black as white people in the household. Circumstances had enabled him to keep a record of all the inmates of the household whom he had known as a child; and now, after some fifty years, while the members of the white family were numbered almost by hundreds, he could count on the fingers of one hand, the descendants and the living members of the black people. This testimony was corroborated by all Americans in the North I had the opportunity of speaking to. The majority of the slaves in the North were household servants, and were kept as articles of luxury, not of profit. In truth, north of Mason and Dixie's line, the negro is an exotic, and can be kept in existence only by an artificial system

It is impossible to obtain any statistics as to the amount of intermarriages which have taken place in the Free States between blacks and whites. It is the universal belief amongst Americans that such intermarriages are rarely fertile, and are invariably productive of similar consequences, to those which attend the repeated intermarriage of near relatives. How far this belief is based on physiological evidence, or how far the fact, if fact it be, may not be accounted for by the climate of the North being unfavourable to the development of the mulatto, are questions concerning which I could never satisfy myself. It is certain that if the mixed race were a productive one in the North, the proportion of quadroons ought to be much larger by this time than that of mulattoes; whereas the barest traveller's observation will convince you that such is not the case. For every quadroon you meet, you see two or three mulattoes. The actual number of mixed marriages I gather to be very small. Amongst the higher classes, the relative social position of blacks and whites, quite apart from the question of colour, would be a bar to intermarriage; while amongst the poor, and amongst persons of the same average rank of life, as the free negro, the prejudice against colour is naturally even more violent and unreasoning than amongst men of education. The connexions, legal or illegitimate, which arise between the two races, are almost, without exception, between white men and coloured women. Even in the lowest houses of

ill-repute in the Free States, no coloured man is allowed to enter. Unfortunately, perhaps, the white male sex is more catholic in its tastes; and of the mixed race, a very large proportion are the illegitimate offspring of white fathers and coloured mothers. Of late years,

however, such connexions are grown less frequent, partly from an advance in public morality, partly from an increased repugnance amongst the white race to any idea of amalgamation with the black.

Now, without wishing for one moment to justify this state of feeling in the Free States, I have my doubts, whether we English are, of all people in the world, the best entitled to condemn it. Wherever our Anglo-Saxon race has spread itself, it has shown an uniform intolerance of an inferior race. The treatment of the native Irish by the English settlers, of the Chinese in Australia, of the New Zealanders by the colonists, and of the Hindoos under the Company's rule, are all developments of the same national instinct. That this impatience of an inferior existence is a low trait in our national character, I admit freely and fully; but then I am somewhat of a sceptic as to the truth of the Yankee and Kingsley creed, and plead guilty to occasional doubts, as to whether our Anglo-Saxon race, in the Old World and in the New, is altogether and in all respects the finest, and grandest, and noblest on the face of God's earth. All I state is, that however inconsistent the facts may seem, a great portion of the

Northern people do unite a very genuine dislike to slavery, and a readiness to make great sacrifices for Abolition, with an extreme distaste to any kind of connexion or amalgamation with the free negro. You must take the good in this world with the bad; and I own I must doubt whether, under like circumstances, the masses in England would take a much more humane or liberal view of the negro question than the masses do in America. The longer I lived in the States, the more I became convinced that America was, to use a mathematical metaphor, the complement of England. The national failings, as well as the national virtues of the New World, are very much those of the mother country, developed on a different and a broader scale.

In these remarks, I have assumed throughout that the negro belongs virtually to an inferior race to that of the white man. Many abolition friends of mine, whose opinions I value highly, consider this assumption erroneous, and repudiate it indignantly as forming some excuse for slavery. The force of this argument was always unintelligible to me. If the negro was as much below the white man in intellectual development as he is above the Australian savage, this is absolutely no reason why he should be bought and sold like a chattel, forced to labour and then robbed of the fruits of his own labour, scourged like a dog at the caprice of his owner, denied the right of education, or marriage, or liberty, and reduced at the