THE AFRICAN IN THE UNITED STATES. 441 



agencies, is the broken social law obstructing the upward tendency of 

 the laboring class. Naturally they are uneasy and restless at the pros- 

 pect of being held perpetually in one place, and made the bottom caste 

 under a social status professedly free. Hence, these periodical up- 

 heavals and outflowings toward Kansas, Indiana, etc., in expectation 

 of relief hoped for in vain ; for there, too, they are no less a distinct 

 and alien race, and the same broken social law bears its issues. 



But what will the upshot be, when the black population, advanc- 

 ing on the white, finally outnumbers it? The outlook is most serious. 

 It is a repetition of the Israelites in Egypt, a lower and laboring class 

 gaining in population on the upper, and, as a distinct and alien race, 

 causing apprehensions to the Egyptians. There is a point at which 

 mere numbers must prevail over wealth, intelligence, and prestige 

 combined. Unless relief comes, when that point approaches, woes 

 await the land. This dark, swelling, muttering mass along the social 

 horizon, gathering strength with education, and ambitious to rise, will 

 grow increasingly restless and sullen under repression, until at length 

 conscious, through numbers, of superior power, it will assert that 

 power destructively, and, bursting forth like an angry, furious cloud, 

 avenge, in tumult and disorder, the social law broken against it. 



2. Treatment of the political aspect of our subject follows a simi- 

 lar line of .thought, and must needs be brief. 



We take it for a certainty that a distinct and alien race like the 

 blacks will always, in the main, vote together. Why they all are now 

 Republicans is readily seen. But should present political parties 

 break up, and others be formed on new issues, the blacks would still 

 naturally go as a body. The circumstances under which they live 

 here, compelling them to stand together socially, will also morally 

 compel them to stand together politically. Confined injuriously by 

 a social barrier, they may be expected to develop abnormally the 

 natural race-instinct, and, under a powerful esprit de corps, cast a 

 solid ballot. 



It is here to be said that we regard it as a mistake, both for the 

 country and for the interests of the Republican party (and this we 

 say with complete freedom' from political bias), that the enfranchise- 

 ment of the blacks followed immediately upon emancipation. The 

 glittering sentence in the inaugural of the late lamented President 

 Garfield, that there is no middle ground between citizenship and the 

 ballot, will scarcely bear examination. The ballot is not a natural 

 right, but a trust, to be granted or withheld for cause. The free 

 blacks, in the early part of the present century, were (if we mistake 

 not) a voting body. Experience, however, showing that the ballot in 

 their hands became a wide-spread source of corruption, and therefore 

 an evil, the privilege was withdrawn. It was a mistake, we conceive, 

 to have given this privilege to a people just freed from the bonds of 

 slavery, and still characterized, as a whole, by profound ignorance ; 



