d the whites will, sooner or later, come to open strife in the
Southern States of the Union? But if it be asked what the issue of the
struggle is likely to be, it will readily be understood that we are
here left to form a very vague surmise of the truth. The human mind may
succeed in tracing a wide circle, as it were, which includes the course
of future events; but within that circle a thousand various chances
and circumstances may direct it in as many different ways; and in
every picture of the future there is a dim spot, which the eye of the
understanding cannot penetrate. It appears, however, to be extremely
probable that in the West Indian Islands the white race is destined to
be subdued, and the black population to share the same fate upon the
continent.

In the West India Islands the white planters are surrounded by an
immense black population; on the continent, the blacks are placed
between the ocean and an innumerable people, which already extends over
them in a dense mass, from the icy confines of Canada to the frontiers
of Virginia, and from the banks of the Missouri to the shores of the
Atlantic. If the white citizens of North America remain united, it
cannot be supposed that the negroes will escape the destruction with
which they are menaced; they must be subdued by want or by the sword.
But the black population which is accumulated along the coast of
the Gulf of Mexico, has a chance of success if the American Union is
dissolved when the struggle between the two races begins. If the federal
tie were broken, the citizens of the South would be wrong to rely upon
any lasting succor from their Northern countrymen. The latter are
well aware that the danger can never reach them; and unless they are
constrained to march to the assistance of the South by a positive
obligation, it may be foreseen that the sympathy of color will be
insufficient to stimulate their exertions.

Yet, at whatever period the strife may break out, the whites of the
South, even if they are abandoned to their own resources, will enter
the lists with an immense superiority of knowledge and of the means of
warfare; but the blacks will have numerical strength and the energy of
despair upon their side, and these are powerful resources to men who
have taken up arms. The fate of the white population of the Southern
States will, perhaps, be similar to that of the Moors in Spain. After
having occupied the land for centuries, it will perhaps be forced