With slavery, observe, disappear, one after the other, the obstacles in the way of agricultural progress.  The capital which no one dares risk to-day in the Southern States, will flow into them emulously as soon as slavery shall be abolished; I say more:  as soon as its progressive abolition shall be no longer doubtful in the sight of all.  European immigration, the current of which turns aside with so much circumspection, avoiding a territory accursed and given over to calamities, will flock towards those countries more beautiful, more fertile, and broader than those of the Far West.  Machinery will come, to more than fill up the void caused by the passing diminution of the number of laborers.  The slaves can be intrusted with none but the simplest implements:  every one knows that the plough, introduced originally into our French colonies, disappeared to make room for the hoe as soon as Colbert had authorized the slave trade.  Ploughs have reappeared there since emancipation.  Their agricultural and industrial progress date from the same epoch:  to-day, our colonists understand the use of manures, and make improvements in manufacture.  A new era is dawning, in fine; what will it be in the United States, among that people which seems destined to surpass all others in the application of mechanics to agriculture?

Still, I have made one concession too much in admitting the diminution of the number of laborers.  Supposing that a few negroes quit the field, many whites will come to take their place.  White labor is fully possible in the majority of the slave States, and immigrants from Europe will not hesitate to engage in it.  Wherever slavery reigns, it is that, and not the climate, that must be arraigned if the whites fold their hands; labor has become there a servile act—­it is blighted, as it were, in its essence.  A competent writer said the other day:  “If Algeria had been subjected to the sway of slavery, cultivation there would have been reputed impracticable for the French, and examples of mortality would not have been wanting.”  The whites have labored in the Antilles; the whites can labor, not only in all the slave States of the intermediate region, but in Louisiana.  Cotton is already produced in Texas, thanks to its German settlers.  The question is only, to go on in this way.  Slavery once abolished, the small proprietors, who at present carry all the criminal extravagancies of the South further than any others, will be compelled to set their hands to work.  This will be an advantage both to the country and themselves.  Who will not pray for the coming of the time when so considerable a part of the population will cease to possess slaves which it is incapable of feeding, when it will be transformed into the middle class, and thus escape the real servitude which embitters it?