PAPERS OF l\fI.R.ABEAU BUONAPARTE LAMAR
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trade; and the vices of the smuggler have been added to those properly belonging to the slaver by forcing him to carry on his trade with the halter round his neck. A comparison of the negro in Africa with what he is in the United States or even iu Cuba aud Brazil, shows the advantage of Western Slavery to the inferior race. The condition of tropical America, where Slavery does not exist, indicates its necessity for the development of the natural wealth of that portion of the world. And of all the countries of tropical America, Nicaragua has most need for a thorough reorganization of labor. The revolutions of nearly forty years have made idlers of a large majority of the population, and but for the exceeding fertility of the soil, would long since have con verted it into a desert. The reintroduction of negro Sla,·ery constitutes the speediest and most efficient means for enabling the white race to establish itself permanently in Central America, and it is the conscious ness of this fact which is leading to a combination of the mixed races of Spanish America for the purpose of excluding Slavery foreYer from the territories now occupied by them. The tendency of this combina tion is, of course, to confine Slavery on the American continent within its present limits; and it appears to me of some importance that the evidences of the combination should be placed before the people of the Southern States. Nor are written and palpable evidences of this combination lacking. You may find them in the archives of Costa Rica at San Jose, and in those of New-Granada at Bogota. Still nearer home you may find the evidences not only o{ the Spanish-American combination, but also of British complicity with it among the archives of ·washington and of Westminster. It is strange that these facts have attracted so little at tention on the part of the Southern people; but they may feel the im portance of them long after they· have lost the power to control the consequences of the combination. To the facts: In the month of l\fay, 1856, a treaty was entered into between the States of New-Granada and Costa Rica. Ostensibly the main object of this treaty was the settlement of a boundary question long pending between the two Republics; and the treaty was signed soon after the English Government had agreed to furnish arms to Costa Rica for the purpose of fighting the Americans in Nicaragua. But in this treaty the strange and singular clause is inserted whereby the contracting parties agree that Slavery shall never be introduced into the territories of either. No intimate relations exist between those Republics; for, although co-terminous, a vast uninhabited region ex tends between the cultivated districts of the two countries. And yet these two sovereignties yield to each powers over the other which one State of your confederacy will not yield either to a sister State or to the Federal Government. It must have been a powerful influence which secured the insertion of such a clause into a treaty concerning boundaries. Nor are we left to conjecture the·source of this influence. Not many weeks after the treaty between Costa Rica and New Granada was signed, Great Britain entered into a treaty by which the Bay Islands were given up to Homluras, with the proviso that Slavery should be forever excluded from them. And this treaty, signed by the Honduras Commissioner and British Secretary of State, is afterwards
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