80 CIVILIZATION OF NEGROES. [CHAP. XXV. 



must expect, unless some plan can be devised to check their in 

 crease, that they will amount, before the close of this century, to 

 twelve millions, by which time the white population will have 

 augmented to eighty millions. Notwithstanding this increase of 

 negroes, were it not for disturbing causes, to which I shall pres 

 ently advert, I should cherish the most sanguine hopes of their 

 future improvement and emancipation, and even their ultimate 

 amalgamation and fusion with the whites, so highly has my esti 

 mate of their moral and intellectual capabilities been raised by 

 what I have lately seen in Georgia and Alabama. Were it not 

 for impediments which white competition and political ascenden 

 cy threaten to throw in the way of negro progress, the grand ex 

 periment might be fairly tried, of civilizing several millions of 

 blacks, not by philanthropists, but by a steadier and surer agen 

 cy the involuntary efforts of several millions of whites. In spite 

 of prejudice and fear, and in defiance of stringent laws enacted 

 against education, three millions of a more enlightened and pro 

 gressive race are brought into contact with an equal number of 

 laborers lately in a savage state, and taken from a continent 

 where the natives have proved themselves, for many thousand 

 years, to be singularly unprogressive. Already their task-mas 

 ters have taught them to speak, with more or less accuracy, one 

 of the noblest of languages, to shake off many old superstitions, to 

 acquire higher ideas of morality, and habits of neatness and clean 

 liness, and have converted thousands of them to Christianity. 

 Many they have emancipated, and the rest are gradually ap 

 proaching to the condition of the ancient serfs of Europe half a 

 century or more before their bondage died out. 



All this has been done at an enormous sacrifice of time and 

 money ; an expense, indeed, which all the governments of Eu 

 rope and all the Christian missionaries, whether Romanist or 

 Protestant, could never have effected in five centuries. Even in 

 the few states which I have already visited since I crossed the 

 Potomac, several hundred thousand whites of all ages, among 

 whom the children are playing by no means the least effective 

 part, are devoting themselves with greater or lesd activity to these 

 involuntary educational exertions. 



