drank too much bad rye-whisky, and exposed
themselves unnecessarily to damp and heat. Dr.
Nott, of Mobile, a well-known authority, had
pronounced the lower portions of the Mississippi
river, with its banks and the numerous
bayous that intersect Louisiana, extremely
healthy and exempt from miasmatic disorders,
though it was a flat alluvial country,
interspersed with interminable lakes, lagunes, and
jungles, and covering several hundred miles of
flats, where vast masses of vegetable moistures
daily decomposed under moist heat.

But the best refutation of this argument for
forced unpaid labour, the captain whispered,
was, it seemed to him, in the fact that (here
he again referred to his pocket-book for secret
figures) there were discovered to be no less
than 1,019,020 free white male labourers over
fifteen years of age engaged in out-door labour
in the Slave states, 55,851 of these being in
the very centre of the cotton country; and
these figures, I must understand, did not
include the free whites engaged in commerce,
trade, manufactures, mechanics, or mining.
Coups de soleil were not commoner in the
South than in a hot summer in England. Then
there was Alabama, hot enough, but it fed
67,000 free whites toiling in its fields; there
was Texas again, almost under the equator, yet
there were there 47,000 free white males, tending
cattle, growing sugar, and picking tobacco,
under an almost African sun.

"There were, indeed," the captain went on
to say, " many persons who, instead of thinking
the South too hot for white men, thought it too
cold for black men; for snow had been seen ten
inches thick in North Carolina, and snow three
and five feet deep—"

"At the battle, too, of New Orleans,
captain," I interposed, " our West Indian black
regiments were so benumbed and intimidated
by the cold of the frosty morning, that they
could not be roused to any exertion. Neither
can the South be unfit for white labour if it be
true, as I have heard, that white women work in
the field there in great numbers in the hottest
autumn, keeping pace with the men, and toiling
hard for a poor twenty-five cents a day."

The captain said the statement was quite
true. The fact was, at the farthest south, at
New Orleans, where the palmetto grew freely
and plantain-trees flourished in every garden,
the stevedores and hack men on the Levee (quay),
where the red brick warehouses shut out the
air and increased the heat, were all healthy white
men, and so were the railroad makers, the
stokers, paviours, draymen, ditchers, and masons.

I asked the captain whether the statistical
tables of comparative deaths confirmed his
view?

The captain replied, " Yes," bringing another
card of figures out of his inexhaustible and
unanswerable pocket-book, and read, sotto voce,
figures which I took no note of, but from which I
remember he deduced the important fact that, in
proportion to population, death occurs more
frequently in Massachusetts than in any Southern
state, except Louisiana, where yellow fever
specially prevails. In this Harper agreed with him
that deaths were more frequent" in New York
than in any of the Southern states, except Maryland,
Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas;
more frequent, in fact, in New Jersey, in
Pennsylvania, and in Ohio, than in Georgia, Florida,
or Alabama.

"Leaving, therefore," said the captain,
triumphantly, resting the logical forefinger of his right
hand on the tip of the argumentative thumb of his
left hand—"leaving, therefore, out Wisconsin and
Louisiana, and comparing the bills of mortality
in the remaining Southern states with those in
the remaining Northern states, we find the
difference decidedly in favour of the latter, so
that, as Harper says, while the ratio of deaths is
as only 1 to 74.60 of the living population in
the Southern states, it is only 1 to 72.39 in
the Northern.

I here ventured to ask, though already feeling
my hand black-gloved with tar, and the
feathers growing in an Horatian way over my
back and shoulders, if the cotton-planters of
the South were not rather improvident and reckless
in exhausting their lands with repeated
crops of the same plant?

Here the worthy and daring captain eyed me
for a moment in silence, as if I were a creature of
a higher hemisphere, and then replied, " Xacly;
you have made a clean shot of it, and your bullet,
stranger, has gone clean through the same hole
as Harper's did, which often happens in good
shooting. The older portions of Alabama are
quite exhausted by the incessant crops of cotton
taken off them, without rest, without fresh
manure, or proper fallow time. The small
planters take off the cream of the land; then,
unable to wait or buy manures, then sail off West
and South in search of virgin land, to waste,
impoverish, and leave in the same manner."

"Like the sloth, captain," said I, " that clings
to the tree till he has eaten the last green leaf,
and then leaves it to die."

"Xacly, mister," continued the captain.
"Wall, the richer men, with more dollars to dig
into the ground, buy out these poor birds of
passage, annex their vacant plantations, and add to
their slave force. Harper and our other
philanthropists regret this, because these richer men
only invest their profits in more land and more
negroes; so that in several of the Slave states the
white population yearly decreases, and the unsafe
and dangerous slave population increases."

Here I may remark that some few weeks
after, at Boston, I read a speech in Harper's
celebrated book of the Honourable C. Clay of
Alabama, which quite corroborated all the cap-
tain had asserted. The honourable gentleman
of the illustrious name said:

"In 1825, Madison county cast about three
thousand votes, now she cannot cast exceeding
two thousand three hundred. In traversing
that county one will discover numerous
farmhouses, once the abode of industrious and
intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or
tenantless, deserted, and dilapidated; he will