What shall we say, then, of an inferior race, slave-born, ignorant, and undisciplined by moral influences, placed suddenly in such new and strange circumstances?  Could we reasonably expect that they would at once labor under freedom as they did under slavery?  Could we demand that the properties which had been sprinkled with the sweat of their unrequited toil for so many years, which possibly had witnessed their sufferings under nameless wrongs, where the tone even of the now labor-paying landlord must have something of the old ring of the slave-master,—­that these should be cultivated as eagerly as their own little farms by freed men?  Especially could we ask it, if the masters undertook to exercise their old sway over political economy, and paid less wages than the market-rate, and even these with irregularity?  Should we be rightfully shocked, if the products of these large estates even entirely failed through want of labor?  What else could we expect?

Suppose, still further, as years went by, the former masters, all the wealthy and powerful classes of society, united in discouraging the improvement and opposing the general education of this, the lowest and poorest class.  What would be the almost certain result?

If we should hear that such an emancipation was an economic failure, we should not be in the least surprised.  If we were told that the freed men would not work on the old estates,—­that the products were falling off,—­that the emancipated slaves were not willing to work at all,—­that they were idle, and were growing constantly more ignorant and corrupt in morals, and useless to the world,—­we should sigh, but say,—­“It is the natural retribution for injustice.  These are the harvests of slavery.”

But if—­contrary to our expectation—­the results of this emancipation were entirely different:  if the freed man produced more than the slave,—­if he was more industrious, more active, more laborious and self-dependent,—­if he even labored for his former master for hire,—­if the latter confessed that the hire of the free man was cheaper than the ownership of the slave,—­if tables of export and import showed that he added far more to the wealth of the world than ever before,—­if the increasing price of land proved the efficiency of his industry,—­if independent freeholds were created in large numbers since emancipation,—­if additional churches and schools made evident the improvement of character and the desire of advancement:  we should be obliged to say that there was but one explanation of this most happy and unexpected improvement, namely,—­that the human soul, by virtue of its very nature and capacities, is somehow adapted to freedom, so that the most imbruted and degraded is better and more useful, when he cares and labors for himself, than when another utterly controls him.

That the negro will not work, unless he is forced to, is the strong and almost invincible objection in the minds of multitudes of persons to emancipation.