If these hasty remarks should call the attention of our farmers to the subject, and induce them to devote some of their leisure hours to the ornamenting of their grounds, I shall be richly rewarded; and I can promise to them also a rich reward.—Their houses will be more cool and healthful, and they will find that by encouraging in their children a taste for gardening, and for observing the native beauties of our forests, their fondness for the innocent pleasures of home and for reading will be increased, together with that unambitious ease and industry which form the distinguishing traits in the character of a virtuous peasantry.
I began this paper with a design to eulogise the art of gardening, and investigate its effects on the mind. I have been diverted, however, from my purpose, and must, in a future number, resume the disquisition.
FOR THE RURAL MAGAZINE.
THE AFRICAN PEOPLE.
It does not appear that sufficient consideration is given to the case of those black people, who have been rendered free by or under the laws of the states and old provinces, from the earliest period. We have established in the city and county of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, a system professing to be for the universal education of the poor, at the public expense, to which the black people, by the taxes upon their real property, consumption taxes, and all the taxes of the whites (except the little personal or occupation tax,) actually contribute. It cannot be denied, that many of them are as truly among the poor, as the most and least poor of the white heads of families, whose children are admitted to this constitutional and legal provision. The blacks also pay all the consumption duties on imported foreign articles, so far as they consume them.
We ought to consider the very low state of the proper blacks in Africa, where their uncivilized condition has long been most unhappily made worse by the neighbourhood of the four Saracen or Moorish piratical States of Barbary, devoted to military plunder, the slavery of the whites and blacks, and the imposter superstitions of Mahomet, sacrilegiously pretending to add himself to the Almighty in the government of his church and his earth. Besides these, the slave dealers of the world have resorted to the African ports and islands, and have combined with powerful, avaricious, and inhuman princes and dealers, in that country, to make out a course of slave traffic with every nation, in whose system of industry African slaves are more profitable and efficient than white labourers. From the islands of Bourbon, Mauritius and Madagascar, round by the Cape of Good Hope and up to the Saracen or Moorish kingdom of Morocco, this system has long prevailed. It is unhappily true, that the great collection of proper Negro districts of Africa, remain now in the darkest state of irreligion, immorality and incivilization. It is also true, that this is so rooted in their system, that the actual transfer, since the year 1620, of a number of Africans to this country now amounting, with their descendants, to about one million and a half of the unmixed and mixed breeds, is to be considered as a great and complicated dispensation of Divine Providence, drawing that numerous people into the bosom and body of an enlightened nation, averse to the traffic, from the date of the first act of Virginia of 1778, abolishing the slave trade, to the present consummation of that prohibition, under the laws of the Union. We have gone, first in Pennsylvania, one step further by our act of 1780, which, while it unhappily recognized the slavery of all the living, instead of emancipating three or four thousand at the public expense, or at the expense of the holders, confined its operation to establishing the freedom of those who should be thereafter born of the slaves held and continuing to be held among us.
In order, so far as in us lies, humbly to justify and bless the dispensation of Providence, which has drawn these people out of the gloomy abyss of the human family in the vast African black-peopled district, stained as it unhappily partially is even by the awful cannibal practice, and by human sacrifices, let us, of Pennsylvania, who have been first to make their native American posterity free, be the most distinguished, in justice to their submissive and patient early labours in forming our fair old province, in dispensing to them the benefits of that religious, moral, scholastic and professional education, without which they cannot live in the good hopes of this their earthly residence or of the world beyond the grave.—It is well understood, that our city and county school system is not practically and effectually extended to the poor black people. An appeal is respectfully made to the friends of religion, morals, useful knowledge, and general industry, whether we ought not to dispense to them a more generous, just and civilized freedom. If we mean to avoid arguments against the gradual and ultimate abolition of slavery, let us endeavour to instruct them in all those things, which will enable them to labour with advantage, to get their own living in the progressive station on this continent, to which it has pleased God to suffer them to be transferred. To the black people themselves, it is proper to recommend a very modest and good conduct in all things, without which they cannot succeed, nor can the endeavours of their best friends be availing and effectual.
A Friend of all the Poor.