No law or legislation would seem to be needed—nothing but the removal of all obstructions from the path of progress, and the free and full development of the laws of industrial attraction. The demands for tropical products, and the greater value of the negro labor—the necessities of modern civilization and the interests of the master—have carried the negro from the Central, as they are now carrying him from the border States, toward the great tropical centre of the continent. And by a beneficent and inevitable necessity which God himself has fixed forever in the economy of the universe, the welfare of the negro is secured in exact proportion as these laws of industrial attraction and adaptation are permitted free action and full development. In conclusion, therefore, it would seem that a simple removal of all obstructions to these fixed and fundamental laws would be all that was needed to secure the best welfare of all—white men and negroes—of the North equally with the South, for while the industrial attraction would remove the negro element just as fast as the interests of the border States may demand, the West can always secure themselves from a considerable negro population, by aiding in the removal of obstructions from our southern borders, as Jefferson saved them sixty years ago. CHAPTER XXI. NORTH AND SOUTH.—ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN IDEA OF GOVERNMENT. Although the progenitors of our so-called slaves were mainly imported at Northern ports, and all of the Northern and Middle States have had, at times, considerable negro populations, the process of transition southward has been so rapid that the Northern communities, or the people of the Northern States, have been but little impressed by them or influenced in their ideas and mental habits by the presence of this widely different and subordinate element of our general population. But when they became a fixed population, when Virginia, especially, had acquired what, by comparison, may be called a large negro element, then the actual presence of these negroes called into existence new ideas, and gave development to new modes of thought or mental habitudes. All our ideas and mental habits are, in a sense, accidental, the result of circumstances, just as language, which is the outward expression of our ideas, becomes changed by time and circumstances. The English of the tenth century were widely different, of course, in their ideas and mental habits from the English of the fourteenth century, under the rule of the Normans; and this difference was widely varied from anything that mere time or ordinary circumstances could have produced.