This inquiry shows how difficult it is for southern minds, accustomed as they have ever been to identify labor with slavery, to conceive the true character and position of such “classes” at the North; and also how ignorant they are of the composition of our Anti-Slavery societies.  To correct your misapprehensions on these points, I will briefly say, in the first place, that the laborers of the North are freemen and not slaves;—­that they marry whom they please, and are neither paired nor unpaired to suit the interests of the breeder, or seller, or buyer, of human stock:—­and, in the second place, that the abolitionists, instead of being a body of persons distinct from “the industrious and laborious classes,” do, more than nineteen twentieths of them, belong to those “classes.”  You have fallen into great error in supposing, that abolitionists generally belong to the wealthy and aristocratic classes.  This, to a great extent, is true of anti-abolitionists.  Have you never heard the boast, that there have been anti-abolition mobs, which consisted of “gentlemen of property and standing?”

You charge upon abolitionists “the purpose to create a pinching competition between black labor and white labor;” and add, that “on the supposition of abolition the black class, migrating into the free states, would enter into competition with the white class, diminishing the wages of their labor.”

In making this charge, as well as in making that which immediately precedes it, you have fallen into the error, that abolitionists do not belong to “the industrious and laborious classes.”  In point of fact, the abolitionists belong so generally to these classes, that if your charge be true, they must have the strange “purpose” of “pinching” themselves.

Whether “the black class” would, or would not migrate, I am much more pleased to have you say what you do on this point, though it be at the expense of your consistency, than to have you say, as you do in another part of your speech, that abolition “would end in the extermination or subjugation of the one race or the other.”

It appears to me highly improbable, that emancipation would be followed by the migration of the emancipated.  Emancipation, which has already added fifty per cent. to the value of estates in the British West Indies, would immediately add as much to the value of the soil of the South.  Much more of it would be brought into use; and, notwithstanding the undoubted truth, that the freedman performs twice as much labor as when a slave, the South would require, instead of any diminution, a very great increase of the number of her laborers.  The laboring population of the British West India Islands, is one-third as large as that of the southern states; and yet, since these islands have got rid of slavery, and have entered on their career of enterprize and industry, they find this population, great as it is, insufficient to meet the increased demand for labor.  As you are aware, they are already inviting laborers of this and other countries to supply the deficiency.  But what is the amount of cultivable land in those islands, compared with that in all the southern states?  It is not so extensive as the like land in your single state.