s one of the deepest
and most intricate which can be presented to the student of politics. It
is impossible to investigate it without meeting with difficulties which
in the present state of knowledge cannot be solved, or without opening
paths of speculation which no human foresight can trace to their end.
This is, indeed, no reason for not attempting its discussion; and Mr.
Fisher, in treating it in its relation to Slavery, has done good work,
and has brought forward important, though much neglected considerations.
He endeavors to place the whole subject of the relations of the white
and the black races in this country on philosophic grounds, and to
deduce the principles which must govern them from the teachings of
ethnological science, or, in other words, from natural laws which human
device can neither abrogate nor alter.

From these teachings he derives the three following conclusions.

"The white race must of necessity, by reason of its superiority, govern
the negro, wherever the two live together.

"The two races can never amalgamate, and form a new species of man, but
must remain forever distinct,--though mulattoes and other grades always
exist, because constantly renewed.

"Each race has a tendency to occupy exclusively that portion of the
country suited to its nature."

If true, these conclusions are of the utmost importance. They are higher
laws, which "must rule our politics and our destiny, either by the
Constitution or over it, either with the Union or without it; and no
wit or force of man is strong enough to resist them." It is to the
exposition of the results which follow from these conclusions, assuming
them to be true, that the larger part of the present essay is devoted.

That these propositions express, or at least point the way to essential
truths, we are fully persuaded. But we are not ready to accept all the
inferences which the author draws from them, or to admit that they
afford sufficient basis for some of his minor assumptions.

Arguing from his first conclusion, the author draws the inference that
"slavery is the necessary result" of the nature of the black and of the
white man. "The negro is by nature indolent and improvident." "He is
also ignorant." "He requires restraint and guidance"; "otherwise he
would sink into helpless, hopeless vice, idleness, and misery." But in
these words, and in others to the same purport, Mr. Fisher assumes that
the nature of the black is incapable of such