We are now prepared to see why the colored population has been, for a considerable time, declining in New York and New England. In those States population is dense; all occupations which afford a comfortable living for a family are crowded and the competition of the white man is quite too much for the negro. If emancipation were now to be made universal, the same thing would rapidly occur in all parts of our country. The white laborer would rush in and speedily crowd every avenue to prosperity and wealth; and the negro, with his inferior civilization, would be crowded everywhere into the lower stratum of the social pyramid, and in a few generations be seen no more. The far more rapid increase of the white race would render the competition more and more severe to him with each successive generation, and render his decay more rapid, and his extinction more certain. I am well aware that this article may fall into the hands of many excellent men who will not relish this argument, nor this conclusion. They will say it were better then to keep the poor negro in slavery. But they would not say so if they would consider the whole case. If slavery were a blessing to the black man, it is so great a curse to the white man that it should never be permitted to exist. The white man can afford to be kind to the negro in freedom; but he cannot afford to curse himself with being his master and owning him as his property. On this point I need not enlarge, for I am devoutly thankful that the literature of Christendom is full of it. But slavery is not a blessing to the negro, even in the view of his condition which I have presented; it is an _unmitigated curse_. To a man of governed passions and virtuous life, it is infinitely better to be an unmarried freeman, enjoying the comforts of this life, and the hopes of the life to come, than to live and die a slave, and the parent of an interminable posterity of slaves. To a being of vicious life and ungoverned passions, all life is a curse, whether in slavery or freedom; and it surely is not obligatory on us, or beneficial to the colored man, to preserve the system of slavery for the sake of perpetuating a succession of such lives down through coming generations.