of the resources of the country he is confident that if the commercial instincts of the natives are quickened by the prospect of certain and immediate gains, a safe, extensive, and profitable trade in cotton might be speedily developed.

The Cotton Supply Association of Manchester, having explored every cotton-producing country of the globe, declare that beyond a question "Africa is the most hopeful source of future supplies." The Association is directing special attention to the Yoruba country, whose inhabitants are enterprising and skillful, and whose chief city, Abbeokuta, is already the seat of a large cotton trade. Eight years ago the first cotton was exported from Lagos, the port of this district, to Great Britain, and amounted to only 235 lbs. Last year three thousand four hundred and forty-seven bales were exported, which was an advance of 100 per cent. in the preceding year. Cotton-gins, sent from England, have been sold to natives in Abbeokuta, and two chiefs ordered and paid for hydraulic presses for packing the cotton. The slave-trade has been extinguished at Lagos. Messrs. Campbell and Delaney, of this country, have a favorable treaty with the government of Abbeokuta, and the African Civilization Society proposes to send thither companies of picked emigrants. "The cotton districts of Africa are more extensive than those of India. The whole line of the western coast of Africa is studded with towns, many of them containing one hundred thousand inhabitants, in which regular marts are established, and from which unlimited supplies may be obtained."*

If, now, we go back to the beginning of the cotton trade in this country and recall its rapid growth, we shall find that this has been artificially created by capital and invention. Thus will it be in Africa, when the capital, the enterprise, and the political power of Great Britain, stimulated by the need of self-protection, shall be directed thither for the cultivation of cotton. England having emancipated her own slaves, will now complete the doom of slavery by emancipating herself. Moreover, by thus opening up new sources of cotton supply, she is

*Speech of Lord Palmerston.

creating new markets for her own cotton manufactures. The American market barely absorbs one-tenth of these. Of British cotton goods we last year imported £3,848,750. In the same year Egypt imported £1,045,988; Brazil, £2,300,101; Turkey, £2,789,954; China, £3,157,359; India, £10,518,094, and in all, for about four million sterling to us, she sold thirty-six million sterling worth of cotton manufactures to other nations. England may yet contrive to do without buying cotton of us, or selling cotton goods to us. But it may be asked, can an American contemplate with satisfaction the possible destruction of a great industrial interest of his own country? The answer is two-fold. When Constantine abolished idolatry throughout the Roman empire, might not a Christian patriot rejoice, though the lucrative business of manufacturing idols and furnishing temples was brought to an end? Must ministers stop preaching the gospel because Demetrius cannot sell any more false gods? But secondly, a cotton competition in Africa that shall break down the slaveholder's monopoly and make slavery too ruinous to be continued, would help, not harm, the industrial enterprises of this country. Free labor would grow cotton cheaper in the south; and this would be no injury to our northern manufacturers, at whose cost the growth of southern cotton was originally protected. Free labor would also create a thrifty peasantry, who would themselves become consumers and buy our manufactures, as has proved to be the case in the British West Indies. Free labor would develop new resources in the south and increase her wealth. And a civilized Africa, vis a vis with our continent, would open to us marts for a profitable and ever increasing commerce. The ratio of increase in the cotton crop of the Southern states has already passed its maximum. For a time this was stimulated by the high price of cotton, the accession of new territory, and the railway system of transportation. But in the last decade, while the increase of cotton production in India has been as five to two, in the United States it has been only as seven to five. The South must cease to depend, like Ireland, upon a single crop. In 1856, a New Orleans journal said of the

cotton crop:

"The main dependence of the world is on this country, which last year furnished three million five hundred thousand bales out of a total product of four million. As the new lands of the west come into cultivation, and the progress of our railroads brings the crop within reach of the sea-board, there will be a gradual increase of our production; but to this even there must be a limit, considering the nature of the climate and the soil necessary, and the time may not be very far distant when we shall fail to meet the demand. Under this state of things, it is not to be wondered at that the Governments of England and France are putting forth every effort to foster the cultivation of cotton in their colonies. We have certainly no cause for fear or jealousy in view of these efforts. Not only are we as producers interested, but the foreign manufacturer, the political econo mist, and the philanthropist, alike have taken the matter into serious consideration. We can scarcely contemplate without emotion the disastrous results, commercially, politically, and socially, that might follow a general failure of only one crop in this country."

3. A third great providential indication for the regeneration of Africa is given in the readiness of intelligent and enterprising men of African descent to enter upon the work of civilizing that continent. For thirty years Africa has been held up before her descendants in this country as a retreat from the unrighteous disabilities under which they labor here—a view that would make the very fact of emigration a brand upon the black man's manhood, and an unworthy subterfuge for the white man's conscience. It could hardly fail that a scheme of colonization, under the moral coercion of Northern prejudices and of Southern terms of emancipation, should cease to attract those whom it was intended to benefit. motives of the early Colonizationists were philanthropic and beneficent; and notwithstanding many mistakes and mishaps, both here and there, the colony of Liberia has achieved a commendable success. Yet three causes have much hindered the plans and hopes of its projectors.

The

(1.) The deportation in mass of much crude material-slaves emancipated on condition of their removal to Liberia, and carrying thither more of the vices than the arts of civilized life.

(2.) The planting of raw emigrants upon an unhealthy coast, without adequate provision for their removal to the more salubrious interior. The Colonization Society has done little toward the exploration of Africa, and the formation of proper agricultural communities.

(3.) The frequent use of the prejudice against color and race as an argument for colonization, which has caused the black man, however unreasonably, to regard the Colonization Society as his masked enemy, and has brought it into collision with the growing anti-slavery sentiment of the times. No doubt these mistakes will be corrected in the future, and Liberia will yet win a worthy place among civilized nations. But the Providence of God is now appealing to the representatives of the African race in this country to go forth for the redemption of the land of their fathers, and thus also for the redemption of their brethren in bonds; to go, not as exiles under a ban, but as pioneers in an army of civilization-not as refugees from oppression, but as missionaries of social reform, equipped with industrial arts, with liberal education, with Christian faith; and this call of Providence, coming in part through the inviting reports from Africa, and in part through the demand for skilled labor upon African cotton, in part also through that indefinable spontaneous feeling in many minds that preludes a great movement,-this call of Providence has stirred the hearts of men of African descent, not to escape from petty annoyances here, but to attempt a noble work beyond the sea for the home of their ancestors, and for freedom and humanity in coming generations. The African Civilization Society is the offspring of this feeling in those who are not ashamed to be African in spirit, though American by birth-and its worthy President stands pledged to go with a picked company in this new enterprise. The point selected for the first movement is the healthy and inviting region of Abbeokuta and Yoruba, in Western Central Africa-with whose chiefs, as before remarked, Campbell and Delaney, the explorers, have a favorable treaty of settlement. At this point also the African Aid Society of England is bending all its energies to increase the supply of cotton for the British market. But the Anglo-Africans who go from America, though offered British aid and British protection, prefer to keep up the name and associations of their native land, though she has turned them out of doors, and trampled them as children of the bondwoman. We honor their filial spirit, and that loyalty to the stars and stripes which

they purpose to maintain in the land of cotton and the palm, and against the slave-ships of the Pirates' Confederacy. We stand committed to this new emigration, not because of any incompatibility between a black American and a white American upon this soil. The black man's rights are the same here as ours. If his rights are denied or unprotected while the power is ours, then the disgrace is ours, not his. If the American flag is not broad enough to cover his head, it is not broad enough to cover ours. If the Union is not great enough and strong enough to protect the equal rights of the humblest of its loyal sons, then it is not worth fighting for. If men in its service, or willing to show their loyalty in its defense, can be seized and sold with impunity because they are black, it had better disband its armies and lie down under the heel of the slavemaster. What is a flag worth that has not enough virtue in it to protect a man because he is a man! If our country's flag cannot do this, give us the flag that makes even the hair of an Englishman sacred among the most savage tribes;-give us the crescent that the Sultan flaunted in the face of Austria, saying this Kossuth whom you demand as a rebel and a traitor claims the rights of hospitality upon my soil, and by the beard of the prophet and the tomb of Mecca he shall have them. No, while we claim to be Americans we will never say to a brother American, Get you gone to Africa because you are black, and we cannot give you the rights of a man. Not because they are black and we are white, do we say to these brethren Go;-not because we are too weak, or too proud, or too mean and wicked to stand by them here-but because by historical and social affinities, and by aptitude for acclimation and labor under a tropical sun, they are fitted more than we, for a great work of human advancement, to which God is now calling some heroic pioneers, as he almost never hath called in the ear of time; because it is given to them to inaugurate the regeneration of a continent, and to develop a race, already rich in physical and sensuous endowment, up to the high standard of Christian civilization; therefore we say to all who will, Go! and God speed you-go for the honor of your race, go for the progress of humanity. Go, that with your own hands you