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by them, and apparently they ever will be, as they ever have been, absolutely essential to its full development.
This need not imply that the slave trade and slavery were right or necessary. The sin was not in the bringing of Africans here, but in the manner of bringing them. God has established His own fixed laws to govern the movements of peoples, but He permits men to carry them out according to their will. Had men willed to be just and humane, they could have induced Africans to come to this continent as free emigrants; but they were selfish and wicked, and therefore forced them to come as slaves. Slavery has been, and is, destroying itself everywhere; and in this country, the great system of free labor and equal rights which prevails, without qualification, in some of the Northern States, is now being offered, and in spite of all opposition will soon be applied, to every State, north and south. It is not probable that it will stop there. It is believed that the same system is destined, in time, to be extended into our tropics. The so-called Anglo-Saxon race in England colonizes; in the United States it expands. Mr. D'Israeli lately pronounced England more an Asiatic than a European power; and the day may come when this country will be more South than North American. We have a means to facilitate future extension towards the tropics in an element of our home population, suited to them, which England never possessed in hers; and after this has been received into our body politic, and is thus enabled to develop its powers, it is not easy to resist the conclusion that its destiny it to carry our civilization into those tropics. The feeble and imperfect nationalities within and near the American tropics are apparently but provisional. They are waiting a better system than their own, and higher powers than they possess, to apply it. The time is likely to come when their ability to furnish the products peculiar to their soil will fall short of the wants of the civilized world without; and should this be the case, it will stimulate us to carry thither our enterprise, and with it our laws and institutions. This has been the process by which they have been carried into California, by Whites alone—gold being the lure; but to places farther south our people of color must assist in being their vehicle, from their special climatic fitness for it; and the two races
