without meeting with difficulties which in the present state of knowledge cannot be solved, or without opening paths of speculation which no human foresight can trace to their end.  This is, indeed, no reason for not attempting its discussion; and Mr. Fisher, in treating it in its relation to Slavery, has done good work, and has brought forward important, though much neglected considerations.  He endeavors to place the whole subject of the relations of the white and the black races in this country on philosophic grounds, and to deduce the principles which must govern them from the teachings of ethnological science, or, in other words, from natural laws which human device can neither abrogate nor alter.

From these teachings he derives the three following conclusions.

“The white race must of necessity, by reason of its superiority, govern the negro, wherever the two live together.

“The two races can never amalgamate, and form a new species of man, but must remain forever distinct,—­though mulattoes and other grades always exist, because constantly renewed.

“Each race has a tendency to occupy exclusively that portion of the country suited to its nature.”

If true, these conclusions are of the utmost importance.  They are higher laws, which “must rule our politics and our destiny, either by the Constitution or over it, either with the Union or without it; and no wit or force of man is strong enough to resist them.”  It is to the exposition of the results which follow from these conclusions, assuming them to be true, that the larger part of the present essay is devoted.

That these propositions express, or at least point the way to essential truths, we are fully persuaded.  But we are not ready to accept all the inferences which the author draws from them, or to admit that they afford sufficient basis for some of his minor assumptions.

Arguing from his first conclusion, the author draws the inference that “slavery is the necessary result” of the nature of the black and of the white man.  “The negro is by nature indolent and improvident.”  “He is also ignorant.”  “He requires restraint and guidance”; “otherwise he would sink into helpless, hopeless vice, idleness, and misery.”  But in these words, and in others to the same purport, Mr. Fisher assumes that the nature of the black is incapable of such improvement as to make what he calls the necessary condition of servitude needless in the interest of either race.  We are surprised that so good a reasoner should speak of the ignorance of the black as a natural disqualification for independence, and the more so, because, in another passage, Mr. Fisher says, with truth, “We darken his mind with ignorance.”  That some form of subjection of the negro may be necessary for a time that extends far into the future is a point we will not dispute; but that slavery, as that word is generally understood, is the necessary result of his nature