“‘Manifest destiny’ has been, for some years, a familiar and accepted phrase in the mouths of our politicians, and each class suggests a plan for carrying it out in accordance with its own specific interests, or some preconceived theory. The pro-slavery adventurer may yet gain a footing in Central America, but it will not be to establish slavery. Slavery once abolished, has never been reëstablished in the same place, in America, except in one instance--that of the smaller French colonies, now again free. The vain effort to reënslave St. Domingo cost the French forty thousand men. The free negro, that nothing else can arouse, will fight against the replacement of the yoke which he has once thrown off; and the number of these in Central America is sufficient to prove a stumbling-block if not a barrier to its return. To reëstablish slavery permanently, where it has once been abolished, is to swim against the great moral current of the age. “We can acknowledge to-day that the persecution of the Puritans by Laud and his predecessors, only intended, as it was, to produce conformity to the Church, really produced New England. And we can now see that the obstinacy of George the Third was as much a cause of the Declaration of Independence, at the time it was made, as the perseverance of John Adams,--the one being the necessary counterpart of the other, the two together forming the entire implement which clipped the tie. Now if we can make the above admissions in respect to these, the two greatest settled questions of modern times, without excusing either persecution or obstinacy in wrong, but keeping steadily in view that every man is responsible for the motives which govern his conduct, be the result of that conduct what it may, why should we not begin to look at this, the third great question of the same class, still _un_settled, from the same point of view? “_If, then, I were asked what was probably the final purpose of negro slavery, I should answer--To furnish the basis of a free population for the tropics of America._