Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/148

134 utility of such a plan needs no comment. Slave owners will smile when they read it.

I will for a moment glance at what many suppose is still the intention of the Colonization Society, viz. gradually to remove all the blacks in the United States. The Society has been in operation more than fifteen years, during which it has transported between two and three thousand free people of color. There are in the United States two million of slaves, and three hundred thousand free blacks; and their numbers are increasing at the rate of seventy thousand annually. While the Society have removed less than three thousand,—five hundred thousand have been born. While one hundred and fifty free blacks have been sent to Africa in a year, two hundred slaves have been born in a day. To keep the evil just where it is, seventy thousand a year must be transported. How many ships, and how many millions of money, would it require to do this? It would cost 3,500,000 dollars a year, to provide for the safety of our Southern brethren in this way! To use the language of Mr Hayne, it would "bankrupt the treasury of the world" to execute the scheme. And if such a great number could be removed annually, how would the poor fellows subsist? Famines have already been produced, even by the few that have been sent. What would be the result of landing several thousand destitute beings, even on the most fertile of our own cultivated shores?

And why should they be removed? Labor is greatly needed, and we are glad to give good wages for it. We encourage emigration from all parts of the world; why is it not good policy, as well as good feeling, to improve the colored people, and pay them for the use of their faculties? For centuries to come, the means of sustenance in this vast country must be much greater than the population; then why should we drive away people, whose services may be most useful? If the moral cultivation of negroes received the attention it ought, thousands and thousands would at the present moment be gladly taken up in families, factories, &c. And, like other men, they ought to be allowed to fit themselves for more important usefulness, as far and as fast as they can.