that which has taken place in the States that are now Free. The process has simply to go on as it began. No reasonable man — no one who knows anything of human nature — can entertain the expectation (however desirable it may seem) that many hundreds of thousands of slave-holders, in fifteen different States of the Union, should at once change all their ways of feeling, thinking, and doing, give up all their long-established social habits and arrangements, and sacrifice property (or what they have always been accustomed to consider as legitimate property) to the enormous amount of between two or three hundred millions sterling (a thousand or fifteen hundred millions of dollars). Such an expectation is chimerical. The case of the English West India planters is, as before shown, an entirely different one. In that case the owners did not give up their slaves at all: they were taken from them by force, and against the protestations of the proprietors, by a superior power to which they happened to be subject — namely, the British Parliament. And the latter felt themselves bound to make at least partial amends, by the payment of twenty millions sterling to the owners. But to what Power are the owners in the Slave States of America subject? To none whatever, except to themselves, or to legislatures chosen by themselves. As already explained, the general Congress has no power whatever in the matter; and the slightest attempt to interfere would be a violation of the Constitution which holds the States together, and the Union would be virtually dissolved. And in what respect would the slaves be the better off in that case? In the Union, or out of the Union, the different slave--
