to adjust the nicely-balanced and adapted relations and
proportions of a vast and complicated structure,--which the finger of
all-pervading wisdom has itself guided in all the steps of its
development. And now, a stroke of the pen is to subvert it all, and
one dictum, of the world knows not whom, accomplish the most
stupendous revolution which all these forty centuries have witnessed.
Suppose the end gained. If any one race now existing was obliterated,
or very materially altered in its physical condition, how large a
proportion of the world's surface would become speedily depopulated,
and so remain until the present condition of things were restored! If
this could happen as to every race _but one_, what a wreck would the
earth exhibit! He who will look with a Christian's eye abroad upon the
families of men, must feel that to accomplish the great hopes that his
heart has conceived for this ruined world, he needs every race that
now peoples it; and must see the hand of God in arresting so speedily
and so signally this pernicious heresy. In the fifth place, he
suggested an argument against amalgamation, which at once showed
the injustice of the outcry against America, and the total
inconsiderateness of Mr. Thompson and his party. The fact was that
this prejudice of color, as it was called, was in all respects mutual;
and so far from being the peculiar sin of America, was the common
instinct of the human race, and existed as really, if not as strongly
on the side of the colored population as on that of the whites. In
proof of this, Mr. Breckinridge cited the case of Hayti, where no man
is allowed the rights of citizenship, unless a certain portion of
black blood runs in his veins; and that of Richard Lander, who, while
travelling in the interior of Africa, as the servant of Park, was
looked upon with comparative favor by the natives on account of his
dark complexion, while his master, who was of a very fair complexion,
was far less a favorite on that account. The North American Indians
and the blacks more readily intermixed than the Indians and the
whites, while the latter connexion, which is not indeed uncommon, is
formed by the marriage of a white man with a squaw; never, or most
rarely, of an Indian and a white woman, the slight, and most
exaggerated number of mulattoes, are nearly without exception, the
offspring of white men and colored women. These facts seemed to show
the reality and nature or the mutual aversion of