It has been urged that the intermingling of the freed blacks with the
whites in these States will produce a variety of people more vicious, and
less willing to be controlled by the social laws, than either pure race.
Of this there is but little danger, as ethnology will show. There will not
be, under any ordinary circumstances, any intermingling of the two races,
for the law of ethnic repugnance is too great. The strong ethnic
antipathies will keep them apart. The possibility of the intermixture of
families and races so widely remote is as rigidly limited as the law of
chemical proportions, and the absorption of the minor quantity is
inevitable. Give both races the same field for expansion in these States,
and the white race will soon find itself in the minority, both of numbers
and in physical strength; for, according to natural laws, the stronger
blood always absorbs the weaker when there is unobstructed action, and
especially when climate favors vastly one of the contending types.
There are to-day four or five times as many centenarians among the blacks
as there are among the whites of the cotton regions.
In consideration of this subject of miscegenation, let us review the
phenomena that have been brought to light by the naturalists who have
studied hybridity among animals, and recall a few facts from history to
support the experimentalists.