Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/459

Rh of the latter now give them? The outlook here is no less serious. Whatever civic capability the blacks may have, it is now in germ; whatever governing aptitude the race may possess, it is at present dormant. In the history of nations it has nowhere, as yet, been exhibited. If this race in the United States is improving, its improvement, as was to have been expected, is slow; and in every political virtue it will still be vastly below the whites, when in voting strength its fecundity will have put it vastly beyond them—so far beyond as to overcome every counter-influence, and give the political reins entirely into its hands.

Who can doubt that, when this day comes, the blacks will obey a race-instinct which all their surroundings will have powerfully tended to develop, and vote blacks alone into office? Thus have they done wherever the power existed. Kept, as they are, a distinct and alien race, no other issue is reasonably conceivable. And who can doubt that, under this state of affairs—an inferior and incompetent race completely dominating, by mere numbers, a superior one—the worse disorders would ensue? The whites would not submit, and a violent and disastrous conflict of races must follow. The whites would hold (1) that, while America is a nation governed by majorities, yet by those who framed the Constitution it was never intended that a race brought here as slaves, an inferior race, one kept distinct by this very inferiority, should, merely through a superior fecundity, become politically supreme, and lord it over the land. They would hold (2) that this political lordship would be ruinous to every interest; that for a short period subsequent to the close of the war it had partially prevailed, and with the unhappiest results; and that, should this lordship become distinctively fastened upon a large section of the Union, the incompetency of the negro to provide, legislatively, for the manifold and complex interests of an advanced civilization, would arrest its activities, paralyze its trade, and spread a decline throughout the entire country.

These are real and gigantic evils gradually looming up, and they merit the immediate and best attention of American statesmen.

Colonization, we conceive, is the remedy—a scheme which the farseeing Henry Clay so warmly advocated, though it cost him the presidency. President Mr. Clay doubtless would have been had his opponents not raised against him the cry of being an abolitionist. But he was no abolitionist. He was a colonizationist. In the negro element, even in the relatively small proportions it bore in his day, his political sagacity saw an increasing danger. It was not only that the negro, while in bondage, made a breach between the free and the slave States (whereof the civil war was the issue), but his clear-sightedness saw evil in the presence of the negro as a negro, whether bound or free. The negro, he perceived, could not unite with any branch of the