horrors of extreme poverty can be avoided at the bottom of
the social pyramid. The severity of this law of wages and population can
thus be greatly mitigated and the comforts of life be universally
enjoyed; but the law itself is necessary and beneficent, and never can
be repealed till human nature and human society are constructed on other
principles than those known to us.

To apply this to the question before us: When by the act of emancipation
the negro is made a free laborer, he is brought into direct competition
with the white man; that competition he is unable to endure; and he soon
finds his place in that lower stratum, which has just been spoken of,
where he can support himself in tolerable comfort as a hired servant,
but cannot support a family. The consequence is inevitable. He will
either never marry, or he will, in the attempt to support a family,
struggle in vain against the laws of nature, and his children will, many
of them at least, die in infancy. It is not necessary to argue to
convince a candid man (and for candid men only is this article written)
that this is, as a general rule, the condition of the free negro. And it
shows, beyond the possibility of mistake, what in this country his
destiny must be. Like his brother, the Indian of the forest, he must
melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us. I do not affirm or
intimate that this must be his destiny in all countries. In the tropical
regions of the earth, where he may have little to fear from the
competition of the more civilized white man, he may preserve and
multiply his race. Let him try the experiment. It is worth trying.

Far be it from me to intimate that the negro is the only class of our
population that are in this sad condition. In our large cities and towns
there are hundreds of thousands of men who have no drop of African blood
in their veins, and who are more clamorous than any other class against
negro equality, who, through ignorance or vice, or superstition, or
inevitable calamity, are in the same hard lot; their children, if they
have any, perish in great numbers in infancy, and they will add nothing
to the future population of our country. That will be derived from a
stronger, nobler parentage. Their race will become extinct. Their case
differs from that of the colored man only in this, that they are not
distinguished by color and features from the rest of the population; so
that the decay of their race cannot be traced b