whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the
victors, though they may more than realize the fears of the vanquished.
It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men;
but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average
negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.
And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his
disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field
and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete
successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a
contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The
highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be
within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means
necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the
position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation
may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward
lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and
the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if
we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the
abolition policy.

The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion;
emancipation may convert the slave from a well fed animal into a
pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton shirts; but
all these evils must be faced, if the moral law, that no human being can
arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own
nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any
physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a
double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than
the freed-man.

The like considerations apply to all the other questions of emancipation
which are at present stirring the world--the multifarious demands that
classes of mankind shall be relieved from restrictions imposed by the
artifice of man, and not by the necessities of Nature. One of the most
important, if not the most important, of all these, is that which daily
threatens to become the "irrepressible" woman question. What social and
political rights have women? What ought they to be allowed, or not
allowed, to do, be, and suffer? And, as involved in, and underlying all
these questions, how ought they to be educated?