This lies at the bottom of the whole difficulty. This refuses to see his good qualities, denies his capacity for improvement, shuts to him the doors of knowledge, cheats him at the polls, wrongs him in the courts, and consigns him perpetually to the position of a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, thus enstamping the race distinction broad and permanent, and awakening in his heart either utter discouragement or implacable hatred. In these three facts—the withholding of the negro’s equal rights, his ignorance and vice, and this caste prejudice—are the elements of a race warfare; they foreshadow another “Impending Crisis”—the next “Irrepressible Conflict.” This becomes the more obvious, because the negro, having been recognized as a _man_ before the law, there is no alternative but to withdraw the recognition or to make it real. There is no middle ground—he must be a slave or a freeman; the equal of his white peers. The “Impending Crisis” is the more imminent from the growth of the blacks in number. In spite of all denials, the time is hastening on when the blacks in the Southern States will outnumber the whites; and when they feel their strength in brawn and muscle—and when especially there arise among them men of education and talent, with ambition aroused and with passion stimulated by a sense of injustice—then will the “Irrepressible Conflict” become as certain as, and, we fear, more implacable than, the last great struggle. But there is a higher stand-point from which to view this great question—the providential. When the negro ceased to be a slave he became invested with a new significance. Then for the first time began to be seen the meaning of his presence in America—the reason why the black man from Africa—the most degraded part of the world—was selected by Divine Providence as one of the Three Brothers to settle this continent. He was the one by whom God could test the nation and call upon it to exemplify before the world the _Brotherhood of Man_. The full test could only be made when the highest should recognize the lowest.