Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/308

Rh other educational institutions to prepare them for a future life of liberty. And this created in me a desire to become acquainted with him and his plantations. But I did not find him a reformer, merely a disciplinarian, with great practical tact, and also some benevolence in the treatment of the negroes. In other respects I found him to be a true representative of the gentlemen of the Southern States—a very polite man, possessing as much knowledge as an encyclopedia, and interesting to me in a high degree through the wealth and fascination of his conversation. He is distinguished for his knowledge of natural history; he has a beautiful collection of the natural productions of America, and the lecture which I heard him read this morning, in the midst of these, on the geology and the rock formation of America, has given me a clearer knowledge of the geological structure of this portion of the world than I ever possessed before.

Mr. C. has an unusual faculty for systematisation, and for demonstrating the characteristic points of a subject. A conversation with him on any subject cannot fail of being interesting, even if one differs from him in opinion.

But as Mr. C., on the question of slavery, unites with the good party in the south, who regard the colonisation of Africa by the liberated negro slaves, as the final result and object of the institution of slavery, it was anything but difficult for me to converse with him on this subject, and that which naturally belongs to it. Neither could I do other than agree with him in the views he expressed regarding the peculiar faculties of the negro race and their future destiny, because they accorded with my own observations. Among those views of his which I must adopt, I recall the following:—

The tropical races cannot attain to the development and intelligence of the native whites in the temperate