they are appalled by it. Thus an able writer on Immigration in a
recent number of the Century passes the topic with this awe-stricken
remark: "This problem (of the Negro) cannot be touched practically;
ancient wrongs bind the nation hand and foot, and its outcome must be
awaited as we await the gathering of the tempest--powerless to avert,
and trembling over the steady approach" (The italics are ours.) This
is not wise; it is not manly. Why try to avert the evils of
immigration, or any other, if we are meanwhile only to await
tremblingly the doom that is to come on us from the conflict with the
Negro?

There is a strong disposition to gather hope from the newly-developed
manufacturing interests in the South. But this is delusive. The South
is essentially a rural population; the new industries will necessarily
be confined to a few localities, and will reach but slightly the wide
agricultural region, and will scarcely touch the Negroes. And more
than all this, these industries will only be importing into the South
the struggle between labor and capital, which so vexes us at the
North. Instead, therefore, of solving the old difficulties at the
South, they will add a new one.

The danger of a war of races is scouted at the North; it is not at the
South. This is natural. The North is not in immediate contact with the
danger; the South is. When the war of the rebellion was impending, the
North refused to believe in its coming; and when it came, one of the
wisest statesmen of the North, Mr. Seward, predicted that it would
"not last sixty days." No such delusion prevailed in the South. Many
of the best men there, nay, nearly all the border States, dreaded its
coming and held back as long as possible, but they were swept
into the flood they foresaw and could not avert.