Since that time the countless multitudes of the red men who inhabited the forests of these lands have disappeared, and other races from an older world and other climes have taken their places, increasing in numbers with as great rapidity as the other declined.
We have seen here the swarthy sons of Nubia, under the fostering care of Slavery, or under the mysterious and unexplained influences of climate, increase with such rapidity, that the ratio for the last decade (previous to the war), if continued for a century, would give a black population of more than forty millions. Strange spectacle in the movement of races!
Here we see, almost during the memory of living men, a distinct race disappear, and a new nation of totally opposite character rise up, as if by magic, in their vanishing footsteps. How prophetic was the speech of the Indian chief to his tribe, when he beheld with dismay the steady progress of the white men who lived upon the cereals! “I say, then,” exclaimed the red man, “to every one who hears me, before the trees above our heads shall have died of age, before the maples of the valley cease to yield us sugar, the race of the sowers of corn will have extirpated the race of flesh-eaters.”
III.
This rate of increase observed among the blacks of our Slave States is not seen among the population of the West India Islands, where singular oscillations are exhibited, and the statistics of the past two centuries have inclined two of the most eminent European statisticians to assert that in a century the negro will nearly have disappeared from these islands.
Observations at Martinique and Guadaloupe certainly warrant the inference. In Cuba the blacks decreased four or five thousand during the period of 1804 to 1817.
This decrease or stand-still in the progress of the race in these regions may have been caused by conditions, moral or physical, wholly within the control of man.
There are animals who will not propagate and continue their species whilst in a state of servitude, and it is reasonable to believe that the same moral causes affect the condition of enslaved mankind. Naturalists have shown how the evils of Slavery degrade animals, and Buffon has pointed out the deep and conspicuous impressions it has made upon the camel.
IV.
Since the discovery and forcible entrance of the golden Empire of Mexico, and the display of her marvellous mineral treasures by the bold Cortez and his companions, we have seen a constant stream of the Spaniards and the affiliated nations of the Latin race pouring across the Atlantic to the new worlds which were given to the house of Castile and Leon by the sublime genius of the Genoese, following the stars and the traditions of the Northmen.