scare their refractory charges with another bugaboo; for the majority of Massachusetts infants would jump at the chance of being carried off by the once terrible Ugly Black Man. Our great danger is from Negrophilism; though Mr. Cushing seems consoled by the fact, that it is a danger to Massachusetts, and not to South Carolina. We think Mr. Cushing may calm his disinterested apprehensions. We believe the disease is not so deep-seated as he imagines; and as we see no reason to fear the immediate catastrophe of the Millennium from any excess of benevolence on the part of Mr. Cushing and his party toward white men, (whose cause he professes to espouse,) we are inclined to look forward with composure to any results that are likely to follow from sporadic cases of sympathy with black ones. There is no reason for turning alarmist. In spite of these highly-colored forebodings, it will be a great while before our colored fellow-citizens, or fellow-denizens, (or whatever the Dred Scott decision has turned them into,) will leave mourning-cards in Beacon Street, or rear mulatto-hued houses on that avenue which it is proposed to build from the Public Garden into the sunset.
It is adroit in Mr. Cushing thus to shift the front of his defence, but it is dreadfully illogical. It is very convenient to make it appear that this is a quarrel of races; for, in such a case, a scruple of prejudice will go farther than a hundredweight of argument. In assuming to be the champion of the downtrodden whites against the domineering blacks, Mr. Cushing enlists on his side the sympathy and admiration which are sure to follow the advocate of the weak and the defenceless. He comes home to New England, finds his own color proscribed, and at once takes the part of amicus curiæ for the weak against the strong in the forum of Humanity. We do not wonder, that a gentleman, who has devoted so much ingenuity, so much time and talent, to making black appear white, should at last deaden the nicety of his sense for the distinction between the two, and thus reverse the relation of the two colors; but we do wonder, that, in choosing Race as a convenient catchword, he should not see that he is yielding a dangerous vantage-ground to the Native American Party, whose principles he seems so pointedly to condemn. We say seems,—for he is carefully indefinite in his specifications, and hedges his opinions with a thicket of ambiguous phrases, which renders it hard to get at them, and leaves opportunity for future evasion. If a war of race be justifiable in White against Black, why not in so-called Anglo-Saxons against Kelts? The one is as foolish and as wicked as the other, and the only just method of solution is the honest old fair field and no favor, under which every race and every individual man will assume the place destined to him in the order of Providence. We have a great distrust of ethnological assumptions; for there is, as yet, no sufficient basis of observed fact for legitimate induction, and the blood in the theorist's own veins is almost sure to press upon the brain and disturb accurate vision, or his preconceptions to render it impossible. Gervinus reads the whole history of Europe in the two words, Teutonic and Romanic; Wordsworth believed that only his family could see a mountain; Dr. Prichard, led astray by a mistaken philanthropy, believed color to be a matter of climate; and Dr. Nott considers that the outline shown by a single African hair on transverse section is reason enough for the oppression of a race. If the black man be radically inferior to the white, or radically different from him, the folly of white-washing him will soon appear. But, on the other hand, if his natural relation to the white man be that of slave to master, our Southern brethren have wasted a great deal of time in prohibitory and obscurantist legislation; they might as well have been passing acts to prevent the moon from running away, or to make the Pleiades know their place.
It will be a blessed day for the world when men are as willing to help each other as they are to assist Providence.
