unrequited toil for so many years, which possibly had witnessed their
sufferings under nameless wrongs, where the tone even of the now
labor-paying landlord must have something of the old ring of the
slave-master,--that these should be cultivated as eagerly as their own
little farms by freed men? Especially could we ask it, if the masters
undertook to exercise their old sway over political economy, and paid
less wages than the market-rate, and even these with irregularity?
Should we be rightfully shocked, if the products of these large estates
even entirely failed through want of labor? What else could we expect?

Suppose, still further, as years went by, the former masters, all the
wealthy and powerful classes of society, united in discouraging the
improvement and opposing the general education of this, the lowest and
poorest class. What would be the almost certain result?

If we should hear that such an emancipation was an economic failure, we
should not be in the least surprised. If we were told that the freed men
would not work on the old estates,--that the products were falling
off,--that the emancipated slaves were not willing to work at all,--that
they were idle, and were growing constantly more ignorant and corrupt in
morals, and useless to the world,--we should sigh, but say,--"It is the
natural retribution for injustice. These are the harvests of slavery."

But if--contrary to our expectation--the results of this emancipation
were entirely different: if the freed man produced more than the
slave,--if he was more industrious, more active, more laborious and
self-dependent,--if he even labored for his former master for hire,--if
the latter confessed that the hire of the free man was cheaper than the
ownership of the slave,--if tables of export and import showed that he
added far more to the wealth of the world than ever before,--if the