he adult population.
The same wide diffusion of knowledge, and large and equal freedom and
participation in the affairs of government, which have done so much for
Northern labor, cannot possibly do less for Southern labor.

For weal or woe the Negro is in the South to stay. He will never leave it
voluntarily, and forcible deportation of him is impracticable. And for
economic reasons, vital to that section, as we have seen, he must not be
oppressed or repressed. All attempts to push and tie him down to the dead
level of an inferior caste, to restrict his activities arbitrarily and
permanently to hewing wood and drawing water for the white race, without
regard to his possibilities for higher things, is in this age of strenuous
industrial competition and struggle an economic blunder, pure and simple,
to say nothing of the immorality of such action. Like water, let the Negro
find his natural level, if the South would get the best and the most out
of him. If nature has designed him to serve the white race forever, never
fear. He will not be able to elude nature; he will not escape his destiny.
But he must be allowed to act freely; nature does not need our aid here.
Depend upon it, she will make no mistake. Her inexorable laws provide for
the survival of the fittest only. Let the Negro freely find himself,
whether in doing so he falls or rises in the scale of life.

With his labor the Negro is in the market of the world. If, all things
considered, he has the best article for the price offered, he will sell;
otherwise not. But it is of immense value and moment to the South in both
respects. If his labor in all departments of industry in which it may be
employed be raised by education of head and hand, by the largest freedom
and equality of opportunities, to the highest efficiency of which it is
capable, who more than the South will reap its resultant benefits? So will
the whole country reap the resultant benefits in the diffused well-being
and productivity of its laboring classes, and at the same time in the
final removal of the ancient cause of difference and discord between its
parts. But if the Negro fail by reason of inherent fitness to survive in
such a struggle, his failure will be followed by decline in numbers and
ultimate extinction, which will involve no violent dislocation of the
labor of the republic, but a displacement so gradual that while one race
is vanishing another will be silently crowding into the space thus