Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/457

Rh agencies, is the broken social law obstructing the upward tendency of the laboring class. Naturally they are uneasy and restless at the prospect of being held perpetually in one place, and made the bottom caste under a social status professedly free. Hence, these periodical upheavals and outflowings toward Kansas, Indiana, etc., in expectation of relief hoped for in vain; for there, too, they are no less a distinct and alien race, and the same broken social law bears its issues.

But what will the upshot be, when the black population, advancing on the white, finally outnumbers it? The outlook is most serious. It is a repetition of the Israelites in Egypt, a lower and laboring class gaining in population on the upper, and, as a distinct and alien race, causing apprehensions to the Egyptians. There is a point at which mere numbers must prevail over wealth, intelligence, and prestige combined. Unless relief comes, when that point approaches, woes await the land. This dark, swelling, muttering mass along the social horizon, gathering strength with education, and ambitious to rise, will grow increasingly restless and sullen under repression, until at length conscious, through numbers, of superior power, it will assert that power destructively, and, bursting forth like an angry, furious cloud, avenge, in tumult and disorder, the social law broken against it.

2. Treatment of the political aspect of our subject follows a similar line of thought, and must needs be brief.

We take it for a certainty that a distinct and alien race like the blacks will always, in the main, vote together. Why they all are now Republicans is readily seen. But should present political parties break up, and others be formed on new issues, the blacks would still naturally go as a body. The circumstances under which they live here, compelling them to stand together socially, will also morally compel them to stand together politically. Confined injuriously by a social barrier, they may be expected to develop abnormally the natural race-instinct, and, under a powerful esprit de corps, cast a solid ballot.

It is here to be said that we regard it as a mistake, both for the country and for the interests of the Republican party (and this we say with complete freedom from political bias), that the enfranchisement of the blacks followed immediately upon emancipation. The glittering sentence in the inaugural of the late lamented President Garfield, that there is no middle ground between citizenship and the ballot, will scarcely bear examination. The ballot is not a natural right, but a trust, to be granted or withheld for cause. The free blacks, in the early part of the present century, were (if we mistake not) a voting body. Experience, however, showing that the ballot in their hands became a wide-spread source of corruption, and therefore an evil, the privilege was withdrawn. It was a mistake, we conceive, to have given this privilege to a people just freed from the bonds of slavery, and still characterized, as a whole, by profound ignorance;