“I am aware, son, that there are powerful emotions in the mind of a negro at the very mention of Africa, or of the sea, or even of a ship. When the importation of slaves was more practised than it is now, the most endearing name by which negroes called each other was ‘shipmate.’ If it was so endearing on their being brought to a foreign country, I can fancy that it must be yet more so, when they return to their own. The little feeling that blacks have is all spent upon their country.” Alfred shook his head, observing that he believed nobody in Demerara was qualified to pronounce on that point. “What! not I, that have had to do with negroes all my life?” “Do you remember the Canary bird that Mary showed you when you were in England?” was Alfred’s reply. “What the little pining thing that was kept in the housekeeper’s room at the Grosvenor Square house? O yes! Mary was very fond of it, I remember.” “Mary gave that Canary its seed and water for years, and she would have laughed if any one had told her that she knew nothing about Canary birds; but it would have been very true; for that tame little creature, drawing up its tiny bucket of water when it was bid, seeing the sunbeams shut out as soon as ever it hailed them with a burst of song, was not like one of the same species with the wild, winged creatures that flit about its native islands, and warble unchecked till twilight settles down upon the woods. And we, father, can never guess from looking at a negro sulking in the stocks, or tilling lands which yield him no harvest, what he may be where there is no white man to fear and hate, and where he may reap whatever he has sown. Happily there are some who have been to Liberia, and can tell us what a negro may become.” SUMMARY. ------- This volume, like the last, enlarges on principles already laid down. It treats of the respective values of different kinds of labour, and of a particular mode of investing capital. The truths illustrated may be arranged as follows. PROPERTY is held by conventional, not natural right. As the agreement to hold man in property never took place between the parties concerned, _i. e._, is not conventional, Man has no right to hold Man in property. LAW, _i. e._, the sanctioned agreement of the parties concerned, secures property. Where the parties are not agreed, therefore, law does not secure property. Where one of the parties under the law is held as property by another party, the law injures the one or the other as often as they are opposed. Moreover, its very protection injures the protected party,—as when a rebellious slave is hanged. ------- Human labour is more valuable than brute labour, only because actuated by reason; for human strength is inferior to brute strength. The origin of labour, human and brute, is the Will.