To slavery, therefore, it is a matter of life
and death to find fresh fields for the employment of slave labor.
Confine it to the present States, and the owners of slave property
will either be speedily ruined, or will have to find means of
reforming and renovating their agricultural system; which cannot be
done without treating the slaves like human beings, nor without so
large an employment of skilled, that is, of free labor, as will widely
displace the unskilled, and so depreciate the pecuniary value of the
slave, that the immediate mitigation and ultimate extinction of
slavery would be a nearly inevitable and probably rapid consequence.
The Republican leaders do not talk to the public of these almost
certain results of success in the present conflict. They talk but
little, in the existing emergency, even of the original cause of
quarrel. The most ordinary policy teaches them to inscribe on their
banner that part only of their known principles in which their
supporters are unanimous. The preservation of the Union is an object
about which the North are agreed; and it has many adherents, as they
believe, in the South generally.
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