work-animals, were obtained in Africa and carried to any port where there was a chance of a market, not in the tropics alone, but all over North America; and the British Provinces of New England, as well as Cuba and Porto Rico, became the marts for traffic in human beings. This accounts for the great mortality of these people in the islands. In general terms, it may be said the negro will work no more than he ought to work; that is, nature has so adapted him that he can not be forced in this respect; but when they could be purchased so cheaply, the master had little interest in their health, and together with the very small native increase going on, the mortality vastly preponderated. The New England as well as the Middle States were fully supplied with these cheap negroes, but they never were profitable, and the laws of industrial adaptation has steadily carried their descendants southward. The “slave trade,” after the first fifty years of its commencement, up to the American Revolution, may be said to have been in the hands of the British mainly, of the merchants of Bristol and Liverpool. These traders, as has been said, made it a mere matter of commerce, dealing in it just as they did in any other article of commerce, and many of the largest fortunes in England are believed to have had their foundations laid in this traffic. So far as the colonists participated in it, they approached somewhat to the earliest Spaniards, and though there were more males imported than there were females, the horrible practice of the islands, which forbade these people to fulfill the command of the Almighty, and multiply their kind, did not prevail to any considerable extent. Nature always recovers from the outrages committed on her laws, and though no legislation or human means has sought to remedy the disproportions of the sexes, they are now probably equal, though of the imported progenitors of our negroes probably two-thirds at least were males, and though even a larger proportion than this were imported into Northern ports, there are now scarcely a quarter of a million in the Northern States, while the descendants of those imported into the North have expanded into four millions at the South! What a lesson these facts present to the blind and infatuated “friends of freedom” in Kansas, and the equally blind believers in the ordinance of 1787. The negro, by a higher law than human enactments, goes where he is needed, and _permanently_ no where else. A broad and liberal survey of the whole ground—the nature of the negro, his utter uselessness when isolated or separated from the white man—his organic adaptation to tropical production—the wonderful fertility of tropical soils—the vast importance of their peculiar products to civilization and human well-being—demonstrates, beyond doubt the right and justice of the original “slave trade,” or the original importation of African negroes into America. The abuses that