The negro is a creature of the tropics, and his labor is essential to the cultivation of tropical and tropicoid products, which, in turn, are essential to the happiness and well-being of all mankind. But, as has been shown, his _mental_ organism renders him incapable—as absolutely and inevitably as the _physical_ organism of the white man renders _him_ incapable of tropical production. In the brief space allowed in this work to the consideration of this vital and most momentous truth, the author could only present a few leading facts in its support, but these _facts_ are so overwhelming that no rational or honest mind in Christendom will venture to dispute the truth in question. Furthermore it may be stated without chance or possibility of historical contradiction, that in the entire experience of mankind no single instance has ever been known when the isolated negro or the labor of the white man has cultivated the soil or grown the products of the tropics. The mind of the white man and the body of the negro—the intellect of the most elevated and the industrial capacities of the most subordinate of all the known human races, therefore, constitute the elements and motive forces of tropical civilization. Every mind capable of reasoning at all will know that civilization is impossible without production, and production in the great tropical centre of our continent being forever absolutely and necessarily impossible without negro labor guided, controlled, and managed by the higher intelligence of the white man—it is therefore absolutely certain that the social relation which English writers have taught the world to regard as a condition of slavery, is simply that social adaptation of the industrial forces of the subordinate race, essential, not alone to their own welfare but to the welfare of all mankind, and without which there can no more exist what we call civilization in a large portion of America than there can be life without food or light without the sun. This is obvious, and indeed unavoidable to those who are in actual juxtaposition with negroes. But in Europe where there are white men only, and where negroes, Indians, Malays, etc., are in the popular imagination beings like themselves except in the complexion, and only need to be civilized, as they suppose, to be like others, it was an easy matter to excite a public feeling hostile to the prosperity of the people of the tropics. The theory, or rather dogma of a single race, that all mankind was a unit, and negroes, Indians, etc., had a common origin and common nature, and therefore common rights, had been set up by English writers during the conflict with the American colonies; and Dr. Johnson, with his usual coarseness of expression, had declared that “the Virginia slaveholders were the loudest yelpers for liberty”—thus, in utter unconsciousness, paying them a compliment when he believed he was inflicting a sarcasm of peculiar virulence.