equally well trained to perform the next
department of their duty, to destroy the man
who struggles in their jaws. Knowing this,
the slave is quiet, and is brought back
unharmed to the estate, the ranchero being
answerable for any damage that may have
been suffered in his hands by the article that
he had undertaken to recover. In ordinary
cases, for each capture he receives twenty
piastres; but his charge is higher when the
chace has extended beyond certain bounds, or
when the case has been complicated by any
skill or courage manifested on the negro's part.

A large exception has to be made among
the ill-treated slaves of Spaniards in favour of
household pets. The Spanish colonist is
luxurious and indolent: his house-slave wears
fine linen, and lives delicately, as a lady's dog
or cat may in this country be dieted on cream
and chicken; while the yard dog gets what
bones he can, and has no mistress to care how
often he may have his ribs kicked by the groom.
Such difference exists between the house-
slave and the field-slave in the Spanish colonies
—a difference that only aggravates our sense of
the wrong done to manhood in their persons.

Again, for the maintenance of the system
which exists among the Spanish colonists, it is
obviously necessary that the importation of
fresh slaves should not be discontinued. The
Spanish Government bound itself to
cooperation in the measures taken for the
suppression of the slave trade on the coast of
Africa. Nevertheless, minor officials in the
Spanish colonies find it well worth their
while to accept the rich commission offered
for assistance in the illegal traffic. We have
been told by friends who have resided at
Havana, of immense sums realised in a single
year by one official out of that perquisite of
office in Spanish American colonies,
connivance at the slave trade. The inhabitants
of colonies are bound to give notice whenever
they may see newly imported slaves driven
across their respective districts. It is the
custom, therefore, in Cuba, to issue along a
projected line of march underhand notification
to the public, in order that all gentlemen
with tender consciences may get out of the
way and have an alibi to plead in case of any
possible inquiry. M. Casimir Leconte, to
whose experience in slave countries, as
detailed a month or two since in the Revue
des Deux Mondes, we are indebted for much
that will be stated here, illustrates this
practice by an example. "I was one day," he
says, "at a large estate in the canton of
Banaguises, and the proprietor expressed his
annoyance at a neglect of duty in his neighbours.
They had passed over his ground
without ceremony a convoy of two thousand
blacks newly imported, and the proprietor
said very reasonably: 'See what a dilemma
they will have placed me in, should the judge
come down and put me to my oath; if they
had only warned me, I might easily have
gone to dinner at Cardenas.'"

But while the contraband traffic in slaves
is essential to the working of the slave
system on its present footing in the Spanish
Antilles, among the Anglo-Americans
importation has entirely ceased. The bodily
condition of the slaves under our cousins in
America—we speak now only of their bodily
condition, rating them not as men, but as so
much live stock—is good. They are, on the
whole, fed as amply, and are as well treated
as the upper class of European horses. They
have therefore thriven and their stock is
multiplied in the land; their inherent power
of reproduction more than balances the amount
of physical decay; and it is not, therefore,
found necessary to import any fresh stock
from abroad. In 1840 the number of slaves
in the United States was not quite two
millions and a half. In the year 1850 there
were more than three millions. The increase
in ten years had amounted to twenty-three
and a half per cent.

The proportion of increase in different
states differs, however, greatly. The slave
system is in a natural way decaying out of
some states, while, for assignable reasons, it is
becoming concentrated in some others. Delaware,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and others,
have already abolished the principle of slavery;
but, amongst those states which retain it for
the present, there are some that are not
likely to retain it many years. In Florida
the slave population has diminished by
fourteen per cent., and has increased only one
and a half per cent, in Maryland. In that
part of Virginia which lies between the
Alleghanies and the states of Pennsylvania,
Ohio, and Kentucky, the slave system is
virtually abolished by the substitution of
German and Irish free labourers for negroes.
The climate, soil, and produce in that part of
Virginia being suited to the industry of
European labourers, proprietors have found
it more to their interest to hire them, and to
sell their slaves. In Virginia, on the other
side of the Alleghanies, the chief produce is
tobacco; and, although slave labour is used
for that, the soil is not sufficient to supply with
labour the whole negro population, and many
people have betaken themselves to the task
of breeding negroes, and exporting them into
the sugar-cane and cotton districts, of which
the development has been extremely great.
In Arkansas, the increase of slave population
has considerably more than doubled in the
last ten years; the increase in Mississippi
has been sixty-four per cent.; fifty-seven per
cent, in Missouri; thirty-seven in Tennessee.
In South Carolina the increase of population
in the ten years was but seven per cent., and
the increase has been very moderate in North
Carolina and Kentucky. It appears, therefore,
that the slave states of America do by no
means hang together as a homogeneous mass.
Slaves are being sold continually out of some
states into others; and, where the cultivation
is not of too tropical a character, the labour