In our own State, however, where we do not grow cotton, sugar, or rice, and where there are no new lands to present a fresh soil to the plough, and to invite settlers from a distance, the increase of population in our chief slaveholding counties has been nothing at all. There has been a decrease, and a very marked one. How has this decrease happened but by a process similar to that which rendered desolate three hundred thousand acres in the champagne of Naples, in the days of Slavery among the Romans--which made Italy itself almost one wilderness, reinhabited by wild boars and other animals, before a single barbarian had crossed the Alps! Let us not conceal the truth from ourselves. Slavery in Maryland is no longer compatible with progress; it is a dead weight and worse; it has become a wasting disease, weakening the vital powers--a leprous distilment into the life blood of the commonwealth. Yet we will have no quacks to prescribe for our malady. It is only necessary that we should become aware of our true condition; there are restorative energies in abundance, rightly directed, to retrieve the State from every disorder to which she is subject. VII. _Emancipation in Maryland: its difficulties._ If we are driven to the conclusion that Slavery in Maryland must terminate, under the operation of tendencies now at work, it becomes a matter of great importance to know something about the manner in which so extensive a change is to be accomplished. Undoubtedly it will not do to remain entirely passive on this subject. I am persuaded that the general sentiment in Maryland is fixed in the conviction that Slavery, here at least, is an evil, and that in some way or other it must be removed. There are two main difficulties which here present themselves. In the first place the negroes amongst us, whether emancipated or enslaved, must remain a distinct class, a servile class, separated from the whites by differences of color, race and civilization. In considering Slavery where such bars of separation between the classes are not found, one may very well imagine how the system may be changed without confusion or disorder; how the enslaved class, gradually admitted to the privileges of freedom, may, after a while, become incorporated with the general body of society; how, thus, all distinctions may be finally destroyed, and how the power, resources, and energy of the State may be vastly increased by the addition of so much active material to her industrial and moral forces. In Rome the sons of freedmen were citizens. Europe could alter her system of Slavery which existed in the middle ages, and which still exists in Poland, Hungary and Russia; she could admit her serfs to some of the rights of citizens, though still withholding many of those rights; she could do this without danger, because serfs and lords were of one complexion, and of one race. The descendant of a peasant might himself in time become a lord.