Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/578

 for the superiority. One or the other would have to be subjugated, extirpated, or expelled; and desolation would overspread their territories, as in St. Domingo, from which it would take centuries to recover. The end would be, that the superiority in cultivating the great tropical staples would be transferred from them to the British tropical possessions.

"They are of vast extent, and those beyond the Cape of Good Hope, possessed of an unlimited amount of labor, standing ready, by the aid of British capital, to supply the deficit which would be occasioned by destroying the tropical productions of the United States, Cuba, Brazil, and other countries cultivated by slave-labor on this continent, as soon as the increased prices, in consequence, would yield a profit. It is the successful competition of that labor which keeps the prices of the great tropical staples so low as to prevent their cultivation with profit in the possessions of Great Britain, by what she is pleased to call free-labor.

"If she can destroy its competition, she would have a monopoly of these productions. She has all the means of furnishing an unlimited supply — vast and fertile possessions in both Indies, boundless command of capital and labor, and ample power to suppress disturbances and preserve order throughout her wide domain.

"It is unquestionable that she regards the abolition of slavery in Texas as a most important step toward this great object of policy, so much the aim of her solicitude and exertions; and the defeat of the annexation of Texas to our Union as indispensable to the abolition of slavery there. She is too sagacious not to see what a fatal blow it would give to slavery in the United States, and how certainly its abolition with us will abolish it over the whole continent, and thereby give her a monopoly in the productions of the great tropical staples, and the command of the commerce, navigation, and manufactures of the world, with an established naval ascendency and political preponderance. To this continent, the blow would be calamitous beyond description. It would destroy, in a great measure, the cultivation and productions of the great tropical staples, amounting annually in value to nearly $300,000,000, the fund which stimulates and upholds almost every other branch of its industry, commerce, navigation, and manufactures. The whole, by their joint influence, are rapidly spreading population, wealth, improvement and civilization over the whole continent, and vivifying, by their overflow, the industry of Europe, thereby increasing its population, wealth, and advancement in the arts, in power, and in civilization.

"Such must be the result, should Great Britain succeed in accomplishing the constant object of her desire and exertions — the abolition of negro slavery over this continent — and toward the effecting of which she regards the defeat of the annexation of Texas to our Union so important.

"Can it be possible that governments so enlightened and sagacious as those of France and the other great continental powers, can be so blinded by the plea of philanthropy as not to see what must inevitably follow, be her motive what it may, should she succeed in her object? It is little short of mockery to talk of philanthropy, with the example before us of the effects of abolishing