The foregoing excerpts seem to us to be the weightiest words of authority on this subject that have fallen under our notice. They deserve to be stamped in letters of gold on the walls of the Public Library in Boston and over the pulpit of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, on the lintels of the White House, and on the title-page of all future editions of _The Independent_ and _The Nation_. Of course, the superior culture and intelligence of our opponents may easily snuff out all _our_ arguments with a sneer at our straitened and archaic provincialism;--so be it: we deserve no better fate, having been born South of Mason and Dixon's line, most imprudently. But what, pray, if they deign to flutter through this volume, what will they do with this utterance of the Puritan _pur sang_, the Chief Statistician? Can they afford to dismiss it as that of "another good man gone wrong." If then the Afro-American race stands even now at the entrance of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, what shall we say, what shall we do? Shall we weep and wail and gnash our teeth? Shall we lift up the trump of indignation against such red-handed iniquity? Shall we cry out to Heaven and to Congress against the crime of the centuries? We think that a much calmer and milder mood may well become us before such a thanatopsis. Why should the spectacle of a racial diminuendo so arouse or revolt us? Surely it is something neither unique nor uncommon. All that breathe will share their destiny. It is appointed unto men once to die. If it were the highest form of human life, we might be concerned or even confounded. But such it is not; on the contrary, it is one of the very lowest, that has hitherto enacted and promises hereafter to enact only unhistorical history. "The old order changeth, yielding place to new." The recession, the evanescence, of the Negro before the Caucasian is only one example among millions of the process of nature. The ministry of death is not maleficent; says the Cabbala, "The Lord said unto the Angel of Death, Behold I have made thee cosmocrator." In the upward mounting of the forms of life, there are no other stepping-stones than their own dead selves. The vision, then, of a race vanishing before its superior is not at all dispiriting, but inspiring rather. It is but a part of the increasing purpose of the ages, a forward creeping of the eternal dawn. The doom that awaits the Negro has been prepared in like measure for all inferior races. Except where they are bulwarked by the climate, they must be drowned by the mounting wave of their superior rivals. To the clear, cold eye of science, the plight of these backward peoples appears practically hopeless. They have neither part nor parcel in the future history of man; they are rejected as dross from its thrice-heated furnace.