The Sun.
London, England, 1857-04-25 00:00:00

suggestion made by Mr. OLMSTED himself. As he
observes, the land is cheap enough, more easily
reached than the Far West ; and if Negro and
free labour cannot intermingle, they may yet work
side by side. The old Virginians are, of course,
horror-struck at the thought of thus seeing the
supremacy of Slaveholders subverted in Virginia
itself. Should emigrants establish themselves
there largely, they, in conjunction with the
wretched whites who are too poor to own slaves,
would be quite a new power.

Not only the land, but all that is on it, tells
the same tale. Railroads are rare, conducted with
no regularity, and run through a country hardly
peopled. All the way from Washington to Rich-
mond, about seventy-five miles, not more than
one-third is cleared, and not more than one-
fourth cultivated. How such railroads are ever
to pay at all is the marvel ; they can hardly be
expected to do it unless northern farmers locate
themselves along the lines. The absence of all
commercial enterprise is the marked characteristic
of the Slave States. They have every facility for
ship-building, but nearly all their ships are built
in the North ; harbours and material facilities for
great commercial ports are there, and the share-
holders rave at the Yankees for monopolising the
traffic from their own shore; but not one practical
step can they take to redeem themselves from
commercial bondage to New York. The ♦ery
wheels of their miserable carts are made in th•
North, the utmost reach of Southern ability not
extending beyond fitting rude poles and frame-
work to wheels which they have not skill to put
together l To drag their hogsheads of tobacco to
market, they drive an axle through them, hang
two poles to the axle for shafts, and contrive two
apologies for wheels by fastening a rude set of
felloes round the hogshead, on which it is thus
rolled along through forest and swamp I
'The cost of negro labour is demonstrably 25
per cent. dearer than free labour in the North,
and taking into account the slovenliness, slow-
ness, awkwardness, and waste with which the ut-
terly uninstructed creatures do their work, fully
50 per cent. dearer. An intelligent man re-
marked to Mr. OLMSTED, " You may make a
nigger work, but you cannot make him think."
Indeed all the thought appears to be directed to
doing as little as possible ; and that not only by
escaping toil, but by rendering the toil itself of
as little service as possible to the master. They
delight in going the longest way round, in moving
as slowly as limbs can be made to move, in break.
ing everything not made too heavy to be de-
stroyed ; the eternal hoe, the substitute for the
freeman's spade or plough, has to be made of
absurd weight and strength, otherwise they would
be sure to break it. All this, however, is but the
result of slavery. The evidence was abundant
and unanswerable, that stimulated by wages, or
urged in any way by the prospect of being better
off for working industriously, negroes are just
like the rest of us : make it their interest to
work and they will work : with force as the only
motive, they do no mere and work no longer
than force compels.

The moral working of the system is all that has
ever been described or imagined. The slaves,
though affectionate and faithful under kind treat-
ment, are yet cunning, deceitful, unreliable, and,
of course, lazy, as we have already mentioned.
That they should think it no crime to steal some-
what from those who steal them altogether,
can hardly be matter of wonder. The masters,
though for the most part not more tyrannical than
could be expected, are, of course, what absolute
power would make the best of us. The com-
mon charge of retaining in slavery their own off-
spring, and even selling them, is, it appears, true
very generally. The sensuality, under the cir-
cumstance., is not to be wondered at ; the bru-
tality which can leave their own children under
the overseer's lash is perhaps the most horrible
fact in American slavery. It is alt to gain a few
dollars. What a thought—that probably much
more than half the slaveholders are fathers of
slaves ! The whites, not slaveholders, are per-
haps amongst the immoral, degraded, and illiterate
beings on the face of the earth. They appear to
live chiefly by receiving from the negroes stolen
goods in return for drink ; while, negro evidence
being inadmissible against whites, there is no
means of convicting them ! Mr. OLMSTED saw
quite enough to satisfy him that it would not be
difficult to train the negroes to use freedom in-
dustriously, that, emancipation might be made pro-
fitable in the majority of cases, and that it was
much more a question of will than of power. It
was so in our West Indian Islands. Estate
managers clung to arbitrary powers, and mortga-
gees clutched twenty millions to indemnify them
for what they had lost, not for the loss oc-
casioned them by abolitipn of slavery. No one
knows this better than our conscientious ex-Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer, W. E. GLADSTONE, Esq.

HEALTH OF THE DUCHESS OF GLOU-

CESTER.

The following bulletin was issued this morning
Gloucester House, April 25, 9 a.m.
" Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Gloucester
has passed a quiet night. There is no material
charge in her Royal Highness's general condition.
(Signed) " ROBERT FERGUSON, M.D.
"E. H. HILLS, M.D."