It is obvious that there is in every community a lower stratum of population, in which wages are sufficient to support the individual laborer in comfort, but not sufficient for the support of a family. This not only always has been so, but it always must be, as long as competition continues to be the test of value; and competition must continue to be the test of value as long as the individual right of property is protected and preserved. Nor is this, as many superficial thinkers of our day have thought it, merely the hard and selfish rule by which Shylock oppresses and grinds the face of his victim: it is a necessary and beneficent law of the best forms of society which can ever exist in this world. The welfare of society in all the future imperatively requires that it should be propagated from the strong, the sound, the healthy, both in body and mind, from the strongest, most vigorous, and noblest specimens of the race; and not from the diseased, the weak, the vicious, the degraded, the broken-down classes. Thus only can the life and health of society be preserved age after age. This is as necessary as it is that the farmer should propagate his domestic animals from the finest of his stock, and not from the diminutive, the weak, and the sickly. And it is accomplished in well ordered society by that very law of wages just stated. As a general rule, it is the very persons who are unfit to be the parents of the coming generation, that are thrown into that lower stratum where wages are insufficient for the support of a family. And just in proportion as the entire structure of society is pervaded by intelligence and virtue, this class of persons will abstain from marriage, by prudently considering that they have not a satisfactory prospect of being able to support a family. It is thus only that the horrors of extreme poverty can be avoided at the bottom of the social pyramid. The severity of this law of wages and population can thus be greatly mitigated and the comforts of life be universally enjoyed; but the law itself is necessary and beneficent, and never can be repealed till human nature and human society are constructed on other principles than those known to us.
To apply this to the question before us: When by the act of emancipation the negro is made a free laborer, he is brought into direct competition with the white man; that competition he is unable to endure; and he soon finds his place in that lower stratum, which has just been spoken of, where he can support himself in tolerable comfort as a hired servant, but cannot support a family. The consequence is inevitable. He will either never marry, or he will, in the attempt to support a family, struggle in vain against the laws of nature, and his children will, many of them at least, die in infancy. It is not necessary to argue to convince a candid man (and for candid men only is this article written) that this is, as a general rule, the condition of the free negro. And it shows, beyond the possibility of mistake, what in this country his destiny must be. Like his brother, the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us. I do not affirm or intimate that this must be his destiny in all countries. In the tropical regions of the earth, where he may have little to fear from the competition of the more civilized white man, he may preserve and multiply his race. Let him try the experiment. It is worth trying.
Far be it from me to intimate that the negro is the only class of our population that are in this sad condition. In our large cities and towns there are hundreds of thousands of men who have no drop of African blood in their veins, and who are more clamorous than any other class against negro equality, who, through ignorance or vice, or superstition, or inevitable calamity, are in the same hard lot; their children, if they have any, perish in great numbers in infancy, and they will add nothing to the future population of our country. That will be derived from a stronger, nobler parentage. Their race will become extinct. Their case differs from that of the colored man only in this, that they are not distinguished by color and features from the rest of the population; so that the decay of their race cannot be traced by the eye and the memory, and expressed in statistical tables.
We are now prepared to see why the colored population has been, for a considerable time, declining in New York and New England. In those States population is dense; all occupations which afford a comfortable living for a family are crowded and the competition of the white man is quite too much for the negro. If emancipation were now to be made universal, the same thing would rapidly occur in all parts of our country. The white laborer would rush in and speedily crowd every avenue to prosperity and wealth; and the negro, with his inferior civilization, would be crowded everywhere into the lower stratum of the social pyramid, and in a few generations be seen no more. The far more rapid increase of the white race would render the competition more and more severe to him with each successive generation, and render his decay more rapid, and his extinction more certain.
I am well aware that this article may fall into the hands of many excellent men who will not relish this argument, nor this conclusion. They will say it were better then to keep the poor negro in slavery. But they would not say so if they would consider the whole case. If slavery were a blessing to the black man, it is so great a curse to the white man that it should never be permitted to exist. The white man can afford to be kind to the negro in freedom; but he cannot afford to curse himself with being his master and owning him as his property. On this point I need not enlarge, for I am devoutly thankful that the literature of Christendom is full of it.
But slavery is not a blessing to the negro, even in the view of his condition which I have presented; it is an unmitigated curse. To a man of governed passions and virtuous life, it is infinitely better to be an unmarried freeman, enjoying the comforts of this life, and the hopes of the life to come, than to live and die a slave, and the parent of an interminable posterity of slaves. To a being of vicious life and ungoverned passions, all life is a curse, whether in slavery or freedom; and it surely is not obligatory on us, or beneficial to the colored man, to preserve the system of slavery for the sake of perpetuating a succession of such lives down through coming generations.
Slavery, by forced and artificial means, propagates society from its lowest and most degraded class, from a race of barbarians held within its bosom from generation to generation, without being permitted to share its civilizing influences. It thus propagates barbarism from age to age, till at last it involves both master and slave in a common ruin. Freedom recruits the ranks of a nation's population from the homes of the industrious, the frugal, the strong, the enlightened, the virtuous, the religious; and leaves the ignorant, the superstitious, the indolent, the improvident, the vicious, without an offspring, and without a name in future generations. Freedom places society, by obeying the law of propagation which God imposed on it, upon an ascending plane of ever-increasing civilization; slavery, by a forced and unnatural law of propagation, places it upon a descending plane of ever-deepening vice and barbarism.
That dread of negro equality which is perpetually haunting the imaginations of the American people, is, therefore, wholly without foundation in any reality. It is a delusion, which has already driven us, in a sort of madness, far on the road to ruin. It is, I fear, a judicial blindness, which the all-wise and righteous Ruler of the universe has sent upon us for the punishment of our sins. The negro does not aspire to political or social equality with the white man. He has evidently no such destiny, no such hope, no such possibility. He is weak, and constantly becoming weaker; and nothing can ever make him strong but our continued injustice and oppression. He appeals not to our fears, but to our compassion. He asks not to rule us: he only craves of us leave to toil; to hew our wood and draw our water, for such miserable pittance of compensation as the competition of free labor will award him—a grave. If we deny him this humble boon, we may expect no end to our national convulsions but in dissolution. If we promptly grant it, over all our national domain, we may expect the speedy return of peace, and such prosperity as no nation ever before enjoyed.