This text is part of:
“
[143]
civil war. We only need to wait, certain to conquer if we wait.”
My friend is right.
A Negro cannot stand the impact of free life; the pressure rends and grinds him. All the vital forces of this world are relative, and for twenty centuries Europe has been the nursery of living power.
Europe supplies the other continents with life-life in plants and animals, as well as in the higher forms of man. You bring a spruce from Europe to America.
That spruce will grow into a forest, and will kill the native trees all round.
Import a horse and cow, and they will drive out buffalo and elk. The lower forms give way in presence of a higher type.
Negro ascendancy, even though supported for a time by Federal troops, will fail before White science, as surely as a forest of plants fades before an English spruce and a herd of game before an English horse.
1875.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.