As for the forlorn, unacclimated exiles in Canada, where there is no demand for the labor which they are peculiarly fit to render, they are not a case in point.  The black servants, cooks, barbers, white-washers, carpet-beaters and grooms of Baltimore and Philadelphia, which form the four-fifths majority of free blacks in those cities, are not idle vagabonds.  Above all, reader, I beg of you to read the dispassionate and calmly written Cotton Kingdom of Frederick Law Olmstead, recently published by Mason Brothers, of New York.  You will there find the fact set forth by closest observation that the negroes in part are indeed lazy vagabonds, but that the majority, when allowed to work for themselves, and when free, do work, and that right steadily.  In the Virginia tobacco factories slaves can earn on an average as much money for themselves, in the ‘over hours’ allowed them, as the manufacturer pays their owner for their services during the day.  There are cases in which slaves, hired for one hundred dollars a year, have made for themselves three hundred.[A]

[Footnote A:  ’If the slaves be emancipated, what with their own natural ability and such aids and appliances as the government and 20,000,000 of people in the North can furnish, I do not believe but that they will get employment, and pay, and, of course, subsistence.’—­HON.  GEORGE S. BOUTWELL.]

But the vagabond surplus,—­the minority?  Is it possible that with Union or disunion before us we can hesitate as to taking on this incumbrance?  In a hard-working land vagabonds must die off,—­’tis a hard case, but the emergency for the white men of this and a coming age is much harder.  After all, there are only some fifteen hundred or two thousand lazy free negroes in New York city,—­the climate, we are told, is too severe for them,—­and this among well-nigh a million of inhabitants.  We think it would be possible to find one single alderman in that city who has wasted as much capital, and injured the commonwealth quite as much, in one year, as all the negroes there put together, during the same time.  It would be absurd to imagine that the emancipation of every negro in America to-morrow would add one million idlers and vagabonds to our population. But what if it did? Would their destiny or injury to us be of such tremendous importance that we need for it peril our welfare as a nation?  The standing armies of Germany absorb about one-fifth of the entire capital of the land.  Better one million of negative negroes than a million of positive soldiers!

There was never yet in history a time when such a glorious future offered itself to a nation as that which is now within our grasp.  In its greatness and splendor it is beyond all description.  The great problem of Republicanism—­the question of human progress—­has reached its last trial.  If we keep this mighty nation one and inseparable, we shall have answered it forever; if not, why then those who revile man as vile and irreclaimably degraded may raise their paeans of triumph; the black spectres of antique tyrants may clap their hands gleefully in the land of accursed shadows, and hell hold high carnival, for, verily, it would seem as if they had triumphed, and that hope were a lie.