ency has been rather to drift apart, there has, on the other hand, been no strong inclination on the part of the freedmen to abandon the South. What Mr.Cable calls the "vast, vague afrite of amalgamation," which was once a real power in the land, seems, through the repulsion born of conflict and changed relations, to have lost its potency for either good or evil. Mr.Cable accounts for its absence in the North by insisting that the Northerners were guided not by instinct, but by "the better dictates of reason and the ordinary natural preferences of like for like."[1] Has the reign of reason begun in the South also? Or, as political antipathies grow feeble, will the Caucasian fastidiousness that grew strong with them also languish and fade? At any rate, some of the best men in the South, as in the North, are standing out courageously for the removal of all degrading disabilities from the colored people, and freeing them from the bondage of restrictions that debase them in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world. If Bishop Dudley's vision of the future be prophetic, and the day be coming, though still far off, when there shall be no more, except as occasional visitants from other lands, either white or black, or red or yellow, within the enlarged confines of the world's great republic, then it is only reasonable that the fore-fathers of the race that is to be should be at liberty to make what alliances please or suit them without being called to account for doing so. There is little danger of the transformation taking place too rapidly, but no excommunications will retard it, if it is to be. As the Hon.Cassius M.Clay says on this very subject, "Here, as elsewhere, we rest upon the survival of the fittest, and we shall see what we shall see."
The presence of the Chinese on this continent adds still further to the complications of the race problem. That, where they obtain a hold in a white community, intermarriage ensues has been shown by the recent census of Victoria, Australia, where one hundred and sixty persons were returned as half-castes. In the report of the commission appointed by the Canadian Government for the purpose of inquiring into the whole subject of Chinese immigration, Dr. Stout, of San Francisco, testifies that such unions had taken place there. Whether the measures adopted for the exclusion of the Chinese will permanently arrest the incoming tide is very doubtful. That the superfluous hordes of Mongols and Tartars will once more cross the limits of race and invade, with force resistless, the strongholds of Western civilization, is the belief of men who are far from being mere dreamers. Though that deluge may not come in our day, plain fore warnings of its approach are not wanting. China has already entered on the path of railway enterprise, and, when the extension of means of communication shall have shortened the overland route to Europe, the drama of Attila may be re-enacted in a new form.
- ↑ "The Silent South" in "The Century," September, 1885.
