will become ultimately homogeneous, and attain to the capacity for orderly self-government. But it is yet too soon to conjecture the probable advent of such a political millennium, or to venture an opinion as to the probable character of the new race that is now being evolved.

With us of the United States the so-called "" race problem" had a later origin, and it is somewhat less complex in character. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors sought no religious or other pretext to enslave the native Indian. Indeed, if the truth must be owned, they seemed to care very little about him anyway. He might have been a member of the human family or he might not; might have had an immortal soul or might not, these were secondary considerations with those who claimed to be "the chosen of the Lord," and commissioned by Him to "drive out the red Philistine and possess themselves of his lands. Denied the privileges of either slave or citizen, and having few rights as an alien which the white man felt bound to respect, the native Indian was never incorporated into the new civilization, and there was never any appreciable amalgamation of the two races. It was simply an instance of "the survival of the fittest," that is to say, of the strongest, such as is being constantly illustrated in the habits. of the lower animals.

Not so, however, with the exotic African. Early in our colonial history, England sought to increase her North American products for home consumption and re-exportation, and to discourage the emigration of her European subjects to the New World, where they were disposed to seek refuge from the oppressions of the Restoration. To accomplish these ends she did not hesitate to fasten upon her colonies the curse of negro slavery, even in violation of her own laws, and over the

repeated protests of our colonial ancestors. Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century, Charles II., by public proclamation, called upon his loyal subjects in England to subscribe to a joint-stock company, organized under government auspices, the declared purpose of which was "the importation of African

slaves into America."

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In a few decades this influx of Africans began to excite alarm, and the legislature of Massachusetts imposed a prohibitory tax upon it. But the law was made inoperative by the interposition of the royal Council, and subsequently each of the royal governors was instructed from London to promptly veto all such presumptious enactments." The result was that, in the colonies of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, every measure by the local legislature looking to a restriction of the African slave-trade was stifled by an executive veto. The colonists next resorted to the right of petition; but every petition to the Crown asking for a restriction of the slave-trade was received with haughty indifference. Finally, in their desperation, the colonists resorted to concert of action. The Congress of 1774 passed a Resolution to the effect that, after December of that year, no more African slaves should be imported into any of the colonies; and, two years later, when the controversy with the mother country culminated in the formal Declaration of Independence, the original draft of that document contained a clause alleging, in justification of the act, that the king of Great Britain had "steadily forbidden all attempts to prohibit, or even to limit, the importation of African slaves into the colonies."

This clause was stricken out, as Mr. Jefferson subsequently admitted, "in complaisance to South Carolina"; thus affording the first example in our colonial

history of the sacrifice of principle to temporary expediency, and, like all such sacrifices, it cost the country dearly. For, up to that time, the colonial Congress, as a de facto body, had stood fairly committed against negro slavery; but now, when for the first time the Congress had become a de jure body as well, it weakly abandoned the whole question in deference to a little handful of rice-planters whose loyalty to the cause of Independence had never been quite above suspicion. Not only did the continental Congress thus abandon the question, but, by subsequent legislation, it virtually legalized slavery by relegating it to the particular colonies or 66 states."

This was the turning-point in the history of the slavery question in the United States. For, as Professor Van Holst has pointed out,1 up to that time, while negro slavery was a recognized fact in each of the colonies, it was not a legal institution in any one of them. Not one of the original charters under which they had been established contained a single word or clause that could be tortured into even a constructive grant of right to property in man. Slavery in the abstract had never been sanctioned by either the common or statutory law of England, and both classes of laws were still of force in each of the thirteen colonies. Nor did the fact that England had forced African slavery upon them, contrary to her own laws, alter the legal aspects of the case. The fatal consequences of this first blunder mark every page of our constitutional and political history from that day to this. We encounter them in the annals of the first Confederation, in the reported proceedings of the Convention of 1787, in articles one and four of the Constitution submitted by that Convention, in the debates pending the final ratification of the Constitution, 1 In his Political and Constitutional History of the United States.