In fact, the negroes are our fellows and our equals much more than we imagine; they adapt themselves better than the Indians to our civilization.  They seek to be instructed, and not only do the free blacks of the English islands hasten, as we have seen, to provide themselves with teachers, but even those of the United States, crushed as they are by contemptuous treatment, neglect no means of introducing their children into the schools, where is found one-ninth of their total number.  In Liberia, they have shown themselves hitherto very capable of ruling.  In Hayti, since their deliverance from the ridiculous and odious yoke of Soulouque, they have advanced rapidly, it is affirmed, in the way of true progress; legal marriages increase, popular instruction is becoming established, religious liberty is respected.  Lastly, in the negro colony of Buxton, in Canada, the fugitive slaves have become industrious landholders, and are respected by all.

Let us not say that prejudice of skin is indestructible; the suppression of slavery may modify it profoundly.  What degrades the free negro to-day, is the existence of the negro slave.  To be respectable, we all need to be respected.  The poor, free negro is ashamed of himself; he dares not aspire to any thing noble and great; he preserves, besides, as the legacy of slavery, the idea that labor is dishonoring, that idleness is a sign of independence.  This is enough to make him remain a stranger to honorable occupations, and confine himself to the practice of vile trades.  When slavery shall have disappeared, the situation of the free blacks will become quite different:  they will be numerous; they will have an appreciable share in the regulation of national affairs; their vote will count, and, thenceforth, we may be tranquil, no one will be afraid to treat them with respect, and perhaps to pay court to them.

The law of New York, as well as the Supreme Court of that State, has already admitted that color exercises no influence over the rights of citizens.  The time draws near when the North will no longer contest the intervention of free negroes at the ballot-box.  This will be a great step in advance.  Let us remark, moreover, that, after general emancipation, the black population, while exercising its share of influence, will never be able, through the number of suffrages at its disposal, to alarm the jealous susceptibility of the whites; the latter, in fact, will be continually recruited by European immigration, and the day will come when the few negroes of the United States will be scarcely perceptible in the heart of a gigantic nation.

The honor of the North is at stake; it belongs to it to give an example at this time, and to show, by the reform of its own habits, that it has the right to combat the crime of the South.  It must set to work seriously, resolutely, to resolve the problem of the coexistence of races, while the South resolves, willing or unwilling, the problem of emancipation.  Liberty in the South, equality in the North; the one is no less necessary than the other; it may even be said that one great obstacle to the idea of emancipation is this other idea that blacks and whites cannot live together, but that one must some day exterminate the other.