men by the prejudice of skin, such as prevails in the United States, we are not long in discovering that it rests in great part on a misunderstanding:  men mistake coexistence for amalgamation.  I do not fear to affirm that the second would be as undesirable as the first would be desirable.  Why dream of blending or of assimilating the two races?  Why pursue as an ideal frequent marriages between them, and the formation of a third race:  that of mulattoes?  America does right to resist such ideas, and to inscribe her testimony against such a future, evidently very little in conformity with the designs of God.

But coexistence by no means draws amalgamation in its train.  On this point, also, experience has spoken.  In the English colonies, the liberty of the blacks is entire, the legal equality of the two races is not contested, public manners have shaped themselves to that mutual consideration without which they could not live together; yet neither amalgamation nor assimilation is in question, and the aristocracy of skin remains what it should be, a lasting distinction, accepted on both sides, between races which are not designed to mingle together.  I do not know that many marriages are contracted between the whites and the negresses of Jamaica, and I believe that the class of mulattoes increases much more rapidly under slavery than with liberty.  Look in this respect at what takes place even now in the United States:  as quadroons sell better than blacks, mixtures, of white or almost white slaves abound there, and the unhappy women who refuse to lend themselves to certain combinations are often whipped in punishment.

With liberty, each race can at least remain by itself; with it, there can be coexistence without amalgamation; both mingling and hostility can be prevented.  This is the more easy, inasmuch as the negroes, with the gentleness of their race, willingly accept the second place, and by no means demand what we insist on refusing them.  Let their liberty be complete, let legal equality and friendly relations be maintained, and they will ask no more.

But they will ask no less, and they are right.  I do not understand, in truth, why so harmless a co-existence should be so long repulsed by the enlightened people of the United States.  There are negroes in Spanish America who have reached the highest grades of the army, and who show as much intelligence, decorum, and dignity in command as white men could do.  I myself have seen at Paris, a clergyman of ebony blackness, who was really the most distinguished, unexceptionable man that it was possible to meet; he was a remarkable scholar, and had received the title of doctor from several European universities.