The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863, page 169 by Various Authors
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an; that competition he is unable to endure; and he soon finds his place in that lower stratum, which has just been spoken of, where he can support himself in tolerable comfort as a hired servant, but cannot support a family. The consequence is inevitable. He will either never marry, or he will, in the attempt to support a family, struggle in vain against the laws of nature, and his children will, many of them at least, die in infancy. It is not necessary to argue to convince a candid man (and for candid men only is this article written) that this is, as a general rule, the condition of the free negro. And it shows, beyond the possibility of mistake, what in this country his destiny must be. Like his brother, the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us. I do not affirm or intimate that this must be his destiny in all countries. In the tropical regions of the earth, where he may have little to fear from the competition of the more civilized white man, he may preserve and multiply his race. Let him try the experiment. It is worth trying.
Far be it from me to intimate that the negro is the only class of our population that are in this sad condition. In our large cities and towns there are hundreds of thousands of men who have no drop of African blood in their veins, and who are more clamorous than any other class against negro equality, who, through ignorance or vice, or superstition, or inevitable calamity, are in the same hard lot; their children, if they have any, perish in great numbers in infancy, and they will add nothing to the future population of our country. That will be derived from a stronger, nobler parentage. Their race will become extinct. Their case differs from that of the colored man only in this, that they are not distinguished by color and features from the rest of the population; so that the decay of their race cannot be traced by the eye and the memory, and expressed in statistical tables.
We are now prepared to see why the colored popula