cent., and leave $100,000,000 as a sinking found to extinguish the principal in some thirty or forty years, and the slave-owner have all his labor on his farm that he had before (for, having no home and no property to buy one with, he must live with and work for his old owner for such wages as said owner may choose to give, to be regulated by law hereafter as may suit the change of relation).

And this $6,000,000,000 is not a debt we tax ourselves to pay, but the world pays it. The speculator who buys the cotton and pays the duty makes the manufacturer pay him his 10 or 15 per cent. net profit on his gross outlay; the manufacturer makes the merchant pay him hi 10 or 15 per cent. on his gross outlay; the merchant charges the retail dealer his 10 or 15 per cent. on his gross outlay, and so on till the shirt is made, and he who wears it out pays the duty and all the different percentages upon it. Thus we will pay to the extent of our consumption of the exported article when manufactured and returned to us-a mere nothing when compared to the immense gratuity, $6,000,000,000, which the world makes to us, and which they so justly should be made to hand over to us for the cold-blooded, heartless indifference with which they have contemplated the bloody, inhuman, barbarous, and apparently hopeless contest in which we have been engaged, and which they at any moment could have arrested by a word. By emancipation I think we would not only render our triumph secure, as I have attempted to prove, in and of itself, but in all future time the negro, in place of being useless in time of war as a soldier, and really dangerous, as we have sen to our cost, continues to be an element of strength; and I think we may reasonably hope that the nations of the earth would o longer be unwilling to recognize us, for surely no people ever before struggled so long and under so many difficulties and endured so many privations so uncomplainingly as we have without finding some friendly hand outstretched to encourage or to help; and there can be no other reason than that we are exclusively and peculiarly a nation of slave-holders. I think that even amongst our enemies numbers would be added to those who are already willing to let us go in piece, for we should thus give the lie at once and forever to the charge that we are waging a war only for negro slavery, and the heart of every honest lover of human liberty throughout the world would sympathize with the men who for their cherished rights of freemen would wage such an unequal contest as we have waged, and besides sacrificing all their earnest convictions as to the humanity and righteousness of slavery, were willing to sacrifice their property interest of $4,000,000,000 to secure their independence, which might all be saved, so far as the promises of our enemies are concerned, by reconstruction. In my judgment the only question for us to decide is whether we shall gain our independence by freeing the negro, we retaining all the power to regulate them by law when so freed, or permit our enemies through our own slaves to compel us to submit to emancipation with equal or superior political rights for our negroes, and partial or complete confiscation of our property for the use and benefit of the negro. And, sir, if the war continues as it is now wages, and we are forced, by the overwhelming odds of the Yankees and our own slaves in arms against us, into submission, it would be but an act of simple justice for the Yankee Government to see to it that their negro allies are at least as well provided for in the way of homes as those who have been arrayed in arms against them. I have always believed, and still believe, that slavery is an institution sanctioned, if not established, by the Almighty, and the most humane