ed population is always slower than that of the white population.

This occurs, as the table just referred to shows, under slavery, where
the pecuniary interest of the master will secure his watchful
cooeperation with the parent to preserve the life of the infant. But in
freedom the same causes act upon the colored race with vastly more
destructive effect. The preservation of infant life and health is then
left solely to the care, skill, and resources of the parent. The result
is that decay of the colored race which we have seen indicated in the
census. It is essential to our purpose that this point should be made
quite plain.

It is obvious that there is in every community a lower stratum of
population, in which wages are sufficient to support the individual
laborer in comfort, but not sufficient for the support of a family. This
not only always has been so, but it always must be, as long as
competition continues to be the test of value; and competition must
continue to be the test of value as long as the individual right of
property is protected and preserved. Nor is this, as many superficial
thinkers of our day have thought it, merely the hard and selfish rule by
which Shylock oppresses and grinds the face of his victim: it is a
necessary and beneficent law of the best forms of society which can ever
exist in this world. The welfare of society in all the future
imperatively requires that it should be propagated from the strong, the
sound, the healthy, both in body and mind, from the strongest, most
vigorous, and noblest specimens of the race; and not from the diseased,
the weak, the vicious, the degraded, the broken-down classes. Thus only
can the life and health of society be preserved age after age. This is
as necessary as it is that the farmer should propagate his domestic
animals from the finest of his stock, and not from the diminutive, the
weak, and the sickly. And it is accomplished in well ordered society by
that very law of wages just stated. As a general rule, it is the very
persons who are unfit to be the parents of the coming generation, that
are thrown into that lower stratum where wages are insufficient for the
support of a family. And just in proportion as the entire structure of
society is pervaded by intelligence and virtue, this class of persons
will abstain from marriage, by prudently considering that they have not
a satisfactory prospect of being able to support a family. It is thus
only that the