al ends are the real aim and purpose of a movement that
the greatest good has been accomplished. The greatest moral results have
often followed when the movement proposed no moral end whatever; while
efforts having a direct moral aim have resulted in signal failure, and
sometimes in disaster even to the very end proposed. Well-meant efforts
to save the heathen in a spiritual way have sometimes resulted in their
physical destruction, through the stealthy obtrusion of the pests of
civilization.

It is by no means as yet a settled question that emancipation will
enhance the happiness of our negro population, or that it may not be the
beginning of a series of disasters to the race which will eventuate in
its extinction on this continent. The settlement of the slave question
may be the beginning of the negro question; and the end of one
difficulty the beginning of another.

It may be that sympathy for the negro is seeking to put in train a
series of changes which would terribly revulse those same sympathies, if
the end could be seen from the beginning. Yet these sympathies, even if
mistaken in their direct object, may be working to a great and desirable
end, which they do not as yet recognize. The Crusaders aimed at what
they considered a good, but, failing in that, accomplished a real good
of which they had no conception. They did not make themselves permanent
masters of the Holy Land, but through their intercourse with each other
and with the more cultivated people of the East, they nourished the
germs of a forthcoming civilization in the West.

In the natural history of the world we discover that certain tribes of
sentient beings prey upon certain other tribes; and this seems, on a
cursory view, to be very shocking to the finer sensibilities of our
nature; yet it is an arrangement which results in a larger amount of
sentient enjoyment than could otherwise obtain among these lower
denizens of our inexplicable world. The most vigorous--that which
embodies within itself the greatest and the most various elements of
vitality and power--the most vigorous, I say, prevails; and if the negro
race of our continent should begin to wane and finally go as the 'poor
Indian' has done--a fate which I do not here predict for him--the field
thus vacated will not be lost, but occupied at once, and in time to its
fullest extent, by a race of greater capabilities for culture, progress,
and enjoyment. The physical world has attained to its