The natural relations of races, and especially of the white man and negro, have been wholly misunderstood, for, ignorant of the nature and specific wants of the negro, it necessarily followed that it should be so. But while in theory we have been ignorant of these relations, the people of the South have solved them in practice. Their actual experience of the negro nature, of its wants, its capacities, its industrial adaptations, perhaps we may say, the instinctive necessities of a society where widely different social elements are in juxtaposition, have developed a social order in practical harmony with the best interests and highest happiness of both races. That society rests on the same basis as that of the North, with the superadded negro element, which, in social subordination corresponding with its natural inferiority and natural relations to the white man, is immovable and everlasting, so long as the foundations of the world remain unaltered and unalterable. Ignorance and impiety may beat against it; folly, delusion, and madness may waste their wild energies in blind warfare on it; European kings and nobles, all those who live and flourish for a time on the perversion of the natural order and the degradation of so many millions of their kind—their natural equals—may combine to overthrow it; dupes, instruments, open foes and secret traitors may aid them, and the great ignorant and deluded masses for a time may be blindly impelled in this direction, but all in vain; the social order—the supremacy of the master and the obedience of the “slave”—will remain forever, for it is based on the higher law of the Almighty, the natural relations of the races, the organic and eternal superiority of the white man and the organic and everlasting inferiority of the negro. CHAPTER XVI. CHATTELISM.