they will become transformed as if touched
by the wand of a fairy.

Such are the future prospects which offer themselves to us. If we
remember, besides, the movement which is beginning to be wrought in the
religious societies and the churches--a movement which cannot fail to be
soon complete, we shall know on what to rely concerning the fate which
awaits a social iniquity against which are at once conspiring the
follies of its friends; and the indignation of its foes.

CHAPTER IX.

COEXISTENCE OF THE TWO RACES AFTER EMANCIPATION.

Something more difficult to foresee than the suppression, henceforth
certain, of slavery, is the consequence of this suppression. The problem
of the coexistence of the two races rests at the present hour with a
crushing weight on the thoughts of all; it mingles poignant doubts with
the hopes of some, it exasperates the resistance of others. Is it true
that emancipation would be the signal of a struggle for extermination?
Is there not room upon American soil for free blacks by the side of free
whites? I do not conceal from myself that there is here an accredited
prejudice, an admitted opinion which, perhaps more than any thing else,
trammels the progress of the United States. Let us attempt to estimate
it.

M. de Tocqueville, who has judged America with so sure an eye, has been,
notwithstanding, mistaken upon some points; his warmest admirers must
admit it. Writing at an epoch when the great results of English
emancipation had not yet been produced, he was led to frame that
formidable judgment of which so much advantage has been taken:
"Hitherto, wherever the whites have been the more powerful, they have
held the negroes in degradation and slavery; wherever the negroes have
been the more powerful, they have destroyed the whites. This is the only
account which can ever be opened between the two races."

Another account is opened, thank God, and no one will rejoice at it more
sincerely than M. de Tocqueville--he who is so generous, and whose
abolition sentiments are certainly no mystery to any of his colleagues
of the Chamber. But his opinion remains in his book, and every one
repeats after him, that the blacks and the whites cannot live together
on the same soil, unless the latter be subject to the former.

I repeat, that at the time at which he wrote, he had reason, or at least
known facts gave him reason, to say this; the liberty of the blacks had
then but one name--St. Domingo