The other question is, What will be the future in the American Republic of these three races? The African, we may be sure, will either die out, which is most probable, or become a low caste, the pariahs of the New World: retail trade and a few of the lower kinds of labour and employment will be open to them. They will possess civil but not political rights. The Irish will be absorbed into the general population; and so one may speculate to what extent this will affect the American character. The Chinese can never be absorbed. What therefore will be the position that they will occupy in the Union fifty or a hundred years hence? Hitherto only one State has been open to them, that of California. Can anything be inferred from the position they have created for themselves in that State? I think we may be safe in supposing that, as they have already crossed the Pacific to the number of sixty thousand, when by the completion of the Pacific Railway the whole of the Union is thrown open to them, they will not remain cooped up in California. In a few years I believe they will be found in New York, and in all the large cities of the west and east. Voltaire said that the true wall of China was the American continent, the interposition of which saved it from European invasion; but it appears now that the American continent is the very point at which the European races will be invaded by the long pent up population of China. To what extent will this invasion be carried? and what consequences will result from it? One thing, I think, may be foreseen—the Americans will not admit these Asiatics, aliens in religion as well as in race, to political equality with themselves. A recent writer on America has informed us that there is a disinclination among the wives of the luxurious cities of the Atlantic seaboard to become mothers. I found, after enquiry made everywhere on the spot, that this indisposition to bring up children is not confined to the wives or to the cities this writer’s words indicate, but is participated in, to a large extent, by the husbands, and is coextensive with the American Union. It is just as strongly felt at Denver, two thousand miles away, as at New York, and results in almost as much evil at New Orleans as at Chicago. [Sidenote: _Limitation of Offspring._]