THE AFRICAN IN THE UNITED STATES. 443 



telligence of the latter now give thern ? The outlook here is no less 

 serious. Whatever civic capability the blacks may have, it is now in 

 germ ; whatever governing aptitude the race may possess, it is at 

 present dormant. In the history of nations it has nowhere, as yet, 

 been exhibited. If this race in the United States is improving, its 

 improvement, as was to have been expected, is slow ; and in every 

 political virtue it will still be vastly below the whites, when in voting 

 strength its fecundity will have put it vastly beyond them so far 

 beyond as to overcome every counter-influence, and give the political 

 reins entirely into its hands. 



Who can doubt that, when this day comes, the blacks will obey a 

 race-instinct which all their surroundings will have powerfully tended 

 to develop, and vote blacks alone into office ? Thus have they done 

 wherever the power existed. Kept, as they are, a distinct and alien 

 race, no other issue is reasonably conceivable. And who can doubt 

 that, under this state of affairs an inferior and incompetent race 

 completely dominating, by mere numbers, a superior one the worse 

 disorders would ensue ? The whites would not submit, and a violent 

 and disastrous conflict of races must follow. The whites would hold 

 (1) that, while America is a nation governed by majorities, yet by 

 those who framed the Constitution it was never intended that a race 

 brought here as slaves, an inferior race, one kept distinct by this very 

 inferiority, should, merely through a superior fecundity, become polit- 

 ically supreme, and lord it over the land. They would hold (2) that 

 this political lordship would be ruinous to every interest ; that for a 

 short period subsequent to the close of the war it had partially pre- 

 vailed, and with the unhappiest results ; and that, should this lordship 

 become distinctively fastened upon a large section of the Union, the 

 incompetency of the negro to provide, legislatively, for the manifold 

 and complex interests of an advanced civilization, would arrest its 

 activities, paralyze its trade, and spread a decline throughout the en- 

 tire country. 



These are real and gigantic evils gradually looming up, and they 

 merit the immediate and best attention of American statesmen. 



Colonization, we conceive, is the remedy a scheme which the far- 

 seeing Henry Clay so warmly advocated, though it cost him the presi- 

 dency. President Mr. Clay doubtless would have been had his oppo- 

 nents not raised against him the cry of being an abolitionist. But he 

 was no abolitionist. He was a colonizationist. In the negro element, 

 even in the relatively small pi-oportions it bore in his day, his political 

 sagacity saw an increasing danger. It was not only that the negro, 

 while in bondage, made a breach between the free and the slave States 

 (whereof the civil war was the issue), but his clear-sightedness saw 

 evil in the presence of the negro as a negro, whether bound or free. 

 The negro, he perceived, could not unite with any branch of the 



