increased production, the extension of commerce and general progress would have a vast influence over the civilization of our times by this simple application of industrial forces in conformity with the fundamental laws of climatic and industrial adaptation. A large majority of our negro population are at this moment outside of their own centre of existence, and a time will come when the border or transition States will probably have few of these people. As observed, it is absurd, a contradiction, an abuse of language, to speak of “slavery,” or the social subordination of the negro, as an evil, or as being, under any possible circumstances, unprofitable, for that involves the anomaly of supposing the idle and good-for-nothing negro a benefit to the State; but the negro is profitable to his master, beneficial to the State, and happy himself in such proportion as he approximates to the tropics, and is placed in juxtaposition with the external circumstances to which God has adapted him. They or their progenitors were mainly landed at northern ports. They were, in the then scarcity of labor, possibly needed even in the Central States. As an advanced guard in the rising civilization of the New World, they were once, perhaps, essential to the Provinces of Virginia, Maryland, etc., for the rich soil, the rank vegetation, the extensive marshes and wild river bottoms generated an extent and degree of malaria that was often fatal to the white man, and rendered the labor and aid of these people of vital importance in the early settlement of the country. But as the country became cultivated and white laborers became plenty, it was seen that the labor of the negro was less valuable; so that Mr. Jefferson, and many of his contemporaries, actually fancied it an evil, and desired to be relieved from it. And indeed, what was worse still—they confounded the existence of the negro with the relation, the so-called slavery, of the negro; and it was only when Louisiana was occupied, and new and appropriate regions were opened to the negro, and in harmony with his industrial capacities, that this erroneous notion of Mr. Jefferson and others disappeared from the southern mind. Virginia has still a large negro population, but while they are mainly employed in cultivating tobacco, suited to the simple capacity and subordinate nature of the negro, the demand for cotton, rice, sugar, etc., in the great tropical regions of the republic, is rapidly attracting them southward, and in conformity with their own happiness as well as the welfare of the white citizenship, this process is destined to go on until they are all within their own centre of existence. Whether or not Virginia, or any other transition State, would be better without them at this time, it is of course impossible to say, or to conjecture even. The simple fact, however, of their presence there would seem to indicate that it was desirable to have them among them yet, or at all events in considerable numbers, but