and of our nature we believe to be utterly untrue.  The whole history of American slavery, far from exhibiting the negro as incapable of improvement, shows him making a slow and irregular advance in the development of intellectual and moral qualities, under circumstances singularly unfavorable.  It is the plea of the advocates of the slave-trade, that the black is civilized by contact with the white.  The plea is not without truth.  It is the universal testimony of slave-owners, and the common observation of travellers, that the city and house slaves, that is, those who are brought into most constant and close relations with the whites, show higher mental development than those who are confined to the fields.  The experiment of education, continued for more than one generation, has never been tried.  The black is in many of his endowments inferior to the white; but until he and his children and his children’s children have shown an incapacity to be raised by a suitable training, honestly given, to an intellectual and moral condition that shall fit them for self-dependence, we have no right to assert that slavery is a necessary condition, if in the meaning of necessary we include the idea of permanence.  It is not needful to present here other objections to this sweeping assertion.  They are old, well-known, and unanswerable.

But leaving this and other points on which we find ourselves at issue with Mr. Fisher, we come to what we regard as the most important part of his pamphlet,—­the results which he shows to follow from the law, that “each race has a tendency to occupy exclusively that portion of the country suited to its nature.”  In the States that lie on the Gulf of Mexico the negro “has found a congenial climate and obtained a permanent foothold.”  “The negro multiplies there; the white man dwindles and decays.”  We should be glad to quote at length the striking pages in which Mr. Fisher shows the prospect of the ultimate and not distant ascendency of the black race in this new Africa.  The considerations he presents are of vital consequence to the South, of consequence only less than vital to the North.  But by the side of “New-Africa” are States and Territories in which the black race has little or no foothold.  Free, civilized, and prosperous communities are brought face to face, as it were, with the mixed and degenerating populations of the Slave country.  In the Free States the white race is increasing in numbers and advancing in prosperity with unexampled rapidity.  In the Slave States the black race is growing in far greater proportion than the white, the most important elements of prosperity are becoming exhausted, and the forces of civilization are incompetent to hold their own against the ever-increasing weight of barbarism.  Shall this new Africa push its boundaries beyond their present limits?  Shall more territory be yielded to the already wide-spread African, race?  It is not the question, whether the unoccupied spaces of