for us, or expedient for them.  Let us take twenty-five years for its accomplishment, within which time they will be doubled.  Their estimated value as property, in the first place, (for actual property has been lawfully vested in that form, and who can lawfully take it from the possessors?) at an average of two hundred dollars each, young and old, would amount to six hundred millions of dollars, which must be paid or lost by somebody.  To this, add the cost of their transportation by land and sea to Mesurado, a year’s provision of food and clothing, implements of husbandry and of their trades, which will amount to three hundred millions more, making thirty-six millions of dollars a year for twenty-five years, with insurance of peace all that time, and it is impossible to look at the question a second time.  I am aware that at the end of about sixteen years, a gradual detraction from this sum will commence, from the gradual diminution of breeders, and go on during the remaining nine years.  Calculate this deduction, and it is still impossible to look at the enterprise a second time.  I do not say this to induce an inference that the getting rid of them is for ever impossible.  For that is neither my opinion nor my hope.  But only that it cannot be done in this way.  There is, I think, a way in which it can be done; that is, by emancipating the after born, leaving them, on due compensation, with their mothers, until their services are worth their maintenance, and then putting them to industrious occupations, until a proper age for deportation.  This was the result of my reflections on the subject five and forty years ago, and I have never yet been able to conceive any other practicable plan.  It was sketched in the Notes on Virginia, under the fourteenth query.  The estimated value of the new-born infant is so low (say twelve dollars and fifty cents), that it would probably be yielded by the owner gratis, and would thus reduce the six hundred millions of dollars, the first head of expense, to thirty-seven millions and a half:  leaving only the expenses of nourishment while with the mother, and of transportation.  And from what fund are these expenses to be furnished?  Why not from that of the lands which have been ceded by the very States now needing this relief?  And ceded on no consideration, for the most part, but that of the general good of the whole.  These cessions already constitute one fourth of the States of the Union.  It may be said that these lands have been sold; are now the property of the citizens composing those States; and the money long ago received and expended.  But an equivalent of lands in the territories since acquired may be appropriated to that object, or so much at least, as may be sufficient; and the object, although more important to the slave States, is highly so to the others also, if they were serious in their arguments on the Missouri question.  The slave States, too, if more interested, would also contribute more by their gratuitous liberation, thus taking on themselves alone the first and heaviest item of expense.