ty can be the law of national life only when the
nation was originally formed from equal elements. But two peoples never
met on the same soil, and under the same government, under conditions so
widely unequal as the European and the African populations of this
country. The Europeans are, to a great extent, the descendants of the
most enlightened men of the world, heirs by birth to the highest
civilization of the nineteenth century. The Africans, on the contrary,
are the known descendants of parents who were taken by force from their
own country, and brought hither as merchandise, sold as chattels and
beasts of burden to the highest bidder; and have even now no
civilization except what they have acquired in this condition of abject
slavery; separated, too, from the dominant class, not only by this
stigma of slavery, but by complexion and features so marked and
peculiar, that a small taint of the blood of the servile class can be
detected with unerring certainty. If history decides anything, it is
that a system of political equality cannot be formed out of such
elements. The experience of the world is against it.

This deeply seated aversion to the recognition of the equality of the
white man and the black man is a potent force, which has been
incessantly active in all our history, and furnishes the only
satisfactory explanation of the fact that slavery did not perish, at
least from all the Northern slave-holding States, long ago. There is,
especially in the Border Slave States, a large non-slave-holding class,
who know that the existence of slavery is utterly prejudicial to their
interests and destructive of their prosperity as free laborers. They are
so keenly sensible of this, that they regard with almost equal hatred
the system of slavery, the negro, and the slave owner. But one
consideration, which is never absent from their minds, always prevails,
even over their regard for their own interests, and receives their
steady and invariable cooeperation with the slave owner in perpetuating
the enslavement of the colored man. That consideration is the dread of
negro equality. If, say they, the colored man becomes a freeman, then
why not entitled to all the privileges and franchises which other
freemen enjoy? And if admitted to political, then surely to social
equality also.

And to many it seems perfectly clear that the universal emancipation of
the negro carries with it by inevitable necessity his admission to the
full