st
question was: How shall liberty be proclaimed to the captive and the
enslaved become free? The second is: Being free, how can the two
races--as distinct and separate as are the white and black races of
the South--now equal before the law, live side by side under the same
government, and live in Christian truth and peace? This is the
problem, and, like the first, it is irrepressible.

In one sense it is a new question--that is, a new generation of white
people has in part come forward to participate in the duties of
citizenship, since all men became men in the law of the land. To them
the question is practically new. The situation as they find it, is this:
The Negroes, who, twenty years ago, were four millions, are now eight
millions. The increase of the blacks above the increase of the whites in
the period of twenty years, is fourteen per cent. In his work on the
African in the United States, Professor Gilliam, having in hand the
figures of our Census Bureau, forecasts with the demonstration of
mathematics our population one century hence. We do not know what may
modify his figures, but he computes that at the present rate of increase
there are to be in the old slave States in one hundred years,
ninety-five millions of whites and double this number of African
descent. Therefore, whatever may modify, it is probable that before one
half an hundred years are over, the numbers of the blacks will furnish
them sufficient guarantee for their legal rights.

There are those in this presence who have seen the population of this
republic multiply itself nearly three times. Our childhood's geography
taught us that twenty-three millions of people lived in the United
States. Now our children learn that there are sixty millions. Twenty
years ago four millions of Negroes and eight millions to-day. Therefore,
as large as the problem now is to us, it will be greater for our
children if we err in our solution of it.

This race of African descent has been declared by constitutional
enactment to be entitled to whatever privileges belong to man, as man.
Standing on this, and beginning with nothing but the heredity of
hindrances, with the brand of color and the prejudice of race against
them, this people have climbed up from their low estate with a
remarkable progress. They have applied themselves to take hold of
knowledge as no other people ever did in the annals of history. They
have made great inroads upon their previous illiteracy.