Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/301

288 forms of civilization were based on unity of race. It was so with the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Hebrews, Egyptians, East Indians. The same holds good of the Moors, who mark the transition from ancient to modern times. All the mediæval attempts at improvement had the same character —in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, England itself. Civilization hitherto has belonged only to the Caucasian race. The Africans have remained strangers to it in all times past; they could not achieve it for themselves at the time, hitherto never rising above the savage or the barbarous state; no other people brought it to them, or them to it, save in small numbers. It was left for America to begin a new experiment in the history of civilization—to bring divers races into closest contact. The Catholic Spaniard began the experiment: he mixed his blood with the red man, whose country he subdued; he brought hither also the black man. Thus the African savage, the American barbarian, and the civilized Caucasian of Spain, became joint stockholders in this new coparceny of races. The Protestant Briton continued what his Catholic predecessor had begun; and, while the Puritan was painfully voyaging to Plymouth, in the wilderness seeking an asylum where the Apocalyptic woman might bear her manchild to grow up in freedom, other Saxons were bringing a ship-load of negroes to the wilderness, to become slaves for ever. Thus the African came to British and Spanish America. Out of the 60,000,000 inhabitants of this continent, I take it about 9,000,000 are of this unfortunate race.

In the United States to-day, four of the five great races live side by side. There are some 60,000 or 80,000 Mongolian Chinese in California, I am told; there are 400,000 American Indians within our borders; perhaps 4,600,000 Africans; and 26,000,000 Caucasians. The union of such diverse ethnological elements makes our experiment of democracy more complex, and perhaps more difficult than it would otherwise be.

The Mongolians are few in numbers, and so transient in their stay that nothing more need now be said of them.

It is plain where the red man will go. In two hundred years, an Indian will be as rare in the United States as now in New England. Like the bear and the buffalo, he