It is, however, discreditable to our intelligence that the statute-book of the nation is disfigured by our laws and legislation on this subject. England has waged a war upon the distinctions of nature and the natural relations of races, ever since we threw off her dominion, and set up a new system of government founded on the fixed and unchangeable laws of nature. The preservation of her own system—the rule of classes and of artificial distinctions among men of the same race—impels her by a blind instinct quite as much, perhaps, as reason, to pursue this policy, and therefore, under the pretense of putting down the “slave trade,” she has constantly labored to obliterate the distinctions of race, and force or corrupt the white men of America into affiliation and equality with negroes. The war upon the “slave trade” was simply the means for accomplishing her ends—the equalization of races in the New World, and in Canada, the West Indies, in all her American possessions, she has succeeded. Negroes, whites, Indians, and mongrels are all alike her _subjects_, and the distinctions of society, as in Europe, are wholly artificial, while those of race, of nature, that are fixed by the hand of the Eternal, are impiously disregarded. And we have been her tools, her miserable dupes, and ourselves labored for our own degradation, to accomplish her objects and obliterate the distinctions of races. The question of importing more negroes—to keep open or to prohibit the “slave trade”—was and is a question of expediency, that our government should decide for itself, without regard to the opinions or policy of any other people. But to blindly follow England in her nefarious and impious efforts to break down the distinctions of race, to pronounce the conduct of our own ancestors infamous and worthy of death because English opinion and monarchical influences and exigencies demand it, is a disgrace to the manhood of our people and the intelligence of our statesmen that should not be permitted to disgrace our government any longer; and it is to be hoped that the time is not distant when this disgraceful legislation will be swept from our statute book. CHAPTER XV. NATURAL RELATIONS AND NORMAL CONDITION OF THE NEGRO. There are now between four and five millions of negroes in the United States. They or their descendants must remain forever—for good or evil—an element of our population. What are their natural relations to the whites?—what their normal condition?