Mr. Trollope should have thought twice before he wrote thus of the American negro. Were he a competent authority on this subject, his opinion might be worth something; but as he never traveled in the South, and as his knowledge of the negro is limited to a surface acquaintance with the West-Indies, we maintain that Mr. Trollope has not only been unjust, but ungenerous. Four millions of slaves, none of whom have any capacity for self-maintenance or self-control! Whom are we to believe? Mr. Trollope, who has never been on a Southern plantation, or Frederick Law Olmsted? Mr. Pierce, who has been superintendent of the contrabands at Fortress Monroe and at Hilton Head, officers attached to Burnside's Division, and last and best, General David Hunter, an officer of the regular army, who went to South-Carolina with anti-abolition antecedents? All honor to General Hunter, who, unlike many others, has not shut his eyes upon facts, and, like a rational being, has yielded to the logic of events. It is strange that these authorities, all of whom possess the confidence of the Government, should disagree with Mr. Trollope. _None_ self-maintaining? Robert Small is a pure negro. Is he not more than self-maintaining? Has he not done more for the Federal Government than any white man of the Gulf States? Tillman is a negro; the best pilots of the South are negroes: are _they_ not self-maintaining? Kansas has welcomed thousands of fugitive slaves to her hospitable doors, not as paupers, but as laborers, who have taken the place of those white men who have gone to fight the battles which they also should be allowed to take part in. The women have been gladly accepted as house-servants. Does not this look like self-maintenance? Would negroes be employed in the army if they were as Mr. Trollope pictures them? He confesses that without these four millions of slaves the South would be a wilderness, therefore they _do_ work as slaves to the music of the slave-drivers' whip. How very odd, that the moment men and women (for Mr. Trollope does acknowledge them to be such) _own themselves_, and are paid for the sweat of their brow, they should forget the trades by which they have enriched the South, and become incapable of maintaining themselves--they who have maintained three hundred and fifty thousand insolent slave-owners! Given whip-lashes and the incubus of a white family, the slave _will_ work; given freedom and wages, the negro _won't_ work. Was there ever stated a more palpable fallacy? Is it necessary to declare further that the Hilton Head experiment is a success, although the negroes, wanting in slave-drivers and in their musical instruments, began their planting very late in the season? Is it necessary to give Mr. Trollope one of many figures, and prove that in the British West-India colonies free labor has exported two hundred and sixty-five millions pounds of sugar annually, whereas slave labor only exported one hundred and eighty-seven millions three