And how infinitely absurd and ridiculous is the plea that the slaves are better off here “_than_ THEY _would have been in Africa_”! Go out into the streets of this city, and take the first one you meet,--perhaps he is a mulatto. But for being here, he would have been a mulatto in the middle of Africa, would he? Take them all,--mulatto, mestizo, zambo, and all “the vast variety of man,” so far as color is concerned,--and if they had not their existence here, they would have had it in Africa! This is the doctrine. Would they have had the same American names also? Would they have spoken the same language, and worn cotton grown on the same fields? The last is just as certain as the first. It is all more silly than the repinings of the silly girls who grieved because their mother had not married a certain rich suitor, whose addresses in early life she had rejected; for then, said they, how rich _we_ should have been! No, not one of these three millions of men, women, and children, would have been in existence in Africa. All the crime of their kidnapping; all the horrors of the middle passage; all their sufferings for two centuries, or six generations; and all the calamities that are yet to grow out of their condition,--all these crimes and agonies are gratuitous crimes and agonies. There is no recompense or palliation for them. They have been added unnecessarily and remorselessly to the amount of human guilt and suffering for which the white race must answer in the day of account. The idea, then, of sending the slaves back to _their_ country is an egregious fallacy. If they were to be sent _back_ whence they came, it would not be to Africa, but to nonentity. If the ancestors of the present three millions of slaves had never been brought here,--if their descendants had never been propagated here, for the supposed value of their services, their places would have been supplied by white laborers,--by men of the Caucasian race,--by freemen. Instead of the three million slaves, of all colors, we should doubtless now have at least three million white, freeborn citizens, adding to the real prosperity of the country, and to the power of the Republic. If the south had not had slaves to do their work for them, they would have become ingenious and inventive like the north, and would have enlisted the vast forces of nature in their service,--wind, and fire, and water, and steam, and lightning, the mighty energies of gravitation and the subtle forces of chemistry. The country might not have had so gaudy and ostentatious a civilization as at present, but it would have had one infinitely more pure and sound.