It is adroit in Mr. Cushing thus to shift the front of his defence, but it is dreadfully illogical. It is very convenient to make it appear that this is a quarrel of races; for, in such a case, a scruple of prejudice will go farther than a hundredweight of argument. In assuming to be the champion of the downtrodden whites against the domineering blacks, Mr. Cushing enlists on his side the sympathy and admiration which are sure to follow the advocate of the weak and the defenceless. He comes home to New England, finds his own color proscribed, and at once takes the part of _amicus curiæ_ for the weak against the strong in the forum of Humanity. We do not wonder, that a gentleman, who has devoted so much ingenuity, so much time and talent, to making black appear white, should at last deaden the nicety of his sense for the distinction between the two, and thus reverse the relation of the two colors; but we do wonder, that, in choosing Race as a convenient catchword, he should not see that he is yielding a dangerous vantage-ground to the Native American Party, whose principles he seems so pointedly to condemn. We say _seems_, --for he is carefully indefinite in his specifications, and hedges his opinions with a thicket of ambiguous phrases, which renders it hard to get at them, and leaves opportunity for future evasion. If a war of race be justifiable in White against Black, why not in so-called Anglo-Saxons against Kelts? The one is as foolish and as wicked as the other, and the only just method of solution is the honest old fair field and no favor, under which every race and every individual man will assume the place destined to him in the order of Providence. We have a great distrust of ethnological assumptions; for there is, as yet, no sufficient basis of observed fact for legitimate induction, and the blood in the theorist's own veins is almost sure to press upon the brain and disturb accurate vision, or his preconceptions to render it impossible. Gervinus reads the whole history of Europe in the two words, _Teutonic_ and _Romanic_; Wordsworth believed that only his family could see a mountain; Dr. Prichard, led astray by a mistaken philanthropy, believed color to be a matter of climate; and Dr. Nott considers that the outline shown by a single African hair on transverse section is reason enough for the oppression of a race. If the black man be radically inferior to the white, or radically different from him, the folly of white-washing him will soon appear. But, on the other hand, if his natural relation to the white man be that of slave to master, our Southern brethren have wasted a great deal of time in prohibitory and obscurantist legislation; they might as well have been passing acts to prevent the moon from running away, or to make the Pleiades know their place.