448 JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS            [Feb. 19,

white population by his indolence and vice. Our large free
negro population affords a nucleus around which the most
discordant elements grow, and in times of war or insurrec-
tion would palsy the arm of State, if they did not assume
hostilities. Our State has betrayed a reckless indifference to
this subject up to the present time, except the enactment of a
few police laws, seldom executed. The act commonly called
the Colonization Law, passed at the December session, 1831,
chapter 314, was intended to stop the increase of free negroes
in our State and provide for the removal of such as were then
free. That law has failed to meet the objects for which it was
intended; for while the necessary funds were absolutely pro-
vided by taxation, the act of emigration was left discretionary
with the negro, who refuses to leave the State. As evidence
of this, there were but 52,000 free negroes in the State at the
time this law took effect; and now, after the expenditure of
over half a million of dollars—by taxation, voluntary con-
tributions, and profits in trade to the coast of Africa—there
is the enormous number of 90,000; an increase of 38,000 in
the short space of twenty-six years. Besides this, the small
number who have emigrated to Africa, have disappointed the
hopes of the friends of the enterprise, and signally failed to
accomplish any permanent settlement.

During the year 1857, the hostile natives made war upon
the scattered settlements in Maryland, in Africa, burnt their
houses, destroyed their property, and drove them to seek shel-
ter under the protection of Liberia. The State of Maryland,
in Africa, is no more; and now forms only a shattered frag-
ment of a county in Liberia. The whole enterprise has failed,
and we trust the wisdom of your Honorable body will devise
other and more efficient remedies.

Though our State has failed to prohibit emancipation with-
in her limits, or to make any useful disposition of those al-
ready free, an outside influence in the person of Abolitionists
has sensibly checked emancipation.

He who acts not as man, but sees the end from the begin-
ning, foresaw that emancipation was the sure road to the ex-
termination of all the sons of Ham in this country; that it
would gender strife between races of men dissimilar in color,
mental acuteness, and moral refinement; that an open com-
petition between two such races would bring ruin to the
negro, as certain as our civilization has. destroyed the once
numerous Indians. And, in order to perpetuate their lives
and perfect his own Divine economy towards them, Deity al-
lowed the wrath of man, in the person of Abolitionists, to
check emancipation, by goading the South into such legisla-
tion as will perpetuate slavery—it being essential to the end
proposed in connection with the African race, whatever that
end may be.