22 Human dignity is a powerful barrier, and I am astonished that, those who desire barriers at any price should strive to suppress this one. I am above all astonished at the gravity employed in computing the influence which four millions of free negroes would exercise on the purity of the American race. These apprehensions might be in some degree comprehended in a very small country with a fixed population ; but in the United States ! Are not statistics at hand to reassure you ! The four millions of free negroes will be only too soon lost, swallowed up, submerged, in the increasing waves of immigration. They will be submerged, they will lose those chances of political supremacy which are to-day gratuitously attributed to them ; the societies of immigration will preserve good order therein, and the movement for the invasion of the South by the North, now that the bulwark of slavery is overthrown, will soon everywhere surround the four millions of negroes. Behold the solution of the problem of the races ; the solution as it is given by your precedents and your natural aptitudes : introduce liberty everywhere, the common law everywhere, and fear nothing ; your almost indefinite power of numerical aggrandizement will charge itself with the preservation of the white race. And at the same time, the black race will have been protected. Slavery protected it in its way. You owe to the freed slaves a new protection, the only one possible henceforth ; the protection of the common law. To-day a question is propounded, which to them, mark well, is a question of life and death. Thrust back, by brutal injustice, into a species of political and social limbo, between slavery and freedom, they must inevitably perish. There is no air respirable between slavery and freedom. If those around me are neither my fellow-citizens nor my masters, they are my enemies ; I embarrass them ; I disquiet them ; I am an anomaly in their national organization which disturbs the present and threatens the future ; being restrained neither by the interest which often arrests the master, nor the respect which one man bears to another they permit themselves everything under such a
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