Here—for the first time in the experience of the race—wealth, cultivation, and intellectual power are arrayed on the side of production and in defence of the rights of labor, not by a warfare on northern capital, as it is sometimes charged, but by demanding that government shall not legislate for the latter at the expense of the former. Nor is the subordinate element—the inferior race in our midst, which, in the providence of God has thus been made the mediate or immediate cause of such vast and boundless benefit to the freedom, progress, and well-being of the superior race—without participation in these benefits. God has designed all His creatures for happiness, and this happiness is always secured when they are in their true position, and in natural relations to each other; and when the condition of the negro is compared with his African state—the existing population with their African progenitors—then it is seen that the progress and happiness of the inferior has matched _pari passu_ with those of the superior race. CHAPTER XXIII. THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO. There are something like twelve millions of negroes in America, on the mainland and the adjacent islands—as large a proportion, perhaps, in view of their industrial adaptation, as there are of the Caucasian or dominant race; and, therefore, whatever may be the contingencies or the wants of the future, there would seem to be no necessity now for any further importation of these people. Of the twelve millions, there are between four and five millions in their normal condition at the South. There are, perhaps, half a million of so-called free negroes, about equally divided between North and South. There are about four millions in Brazil, Cuba, and Porto Rico of so-called slaves, but really in a widely different condition from that common to the South. Finally, there are between three and four millions of so-called free negroes in the tropics, in Jamaica, Hayti, and the other islands, with some thousands, however, scattered about the coast towns, and in the _terra caliente_ of the mainland. The free negro, in the American Union, as has been stated, is destined to extinction. It is only a question of time, when this doom will be accomplished. The census returns, and the universal experience, recognize this deplorable truth; but beyond them, and independent of any demonstration whatever, their extinction is a necessity—is as legitimate and unavoidable as any other _effect_ or effects linked by inevitable necessity with their predetermining cause or causes. They are not merely turned loose—abandoned to their fate without masters or protectors to look after them, but they are assumed to be Caucasians, _black_-white men, creatures like ourselves, with the same capacities, and the same wants, and though no one assumes to do so individually, _society_ forces them to live up to the theory in question, and, as this is impossible,