To state articulately, and put into practical lawbooks, what on all sides is fair, from the West Indian white to the West Indian black; what relations the Eternal Maker has established between these two creatures of His; what He has written down with intricate but ineffaceable record, legible to candid human insight, in the respective qualities, strengths, necessities and capabilities of each of the two: this will be a long problem, only to be solved by continuous human endeavor and earnest effort gradually perfecting itself as experience successively yields new light to it. This will be to åind the right terms;・terms of a contract that will endure, and be sanctioned by heaven and obtain prosperity on earth, between the two. A long problem, terribly neglected hitherto; whence these West Indian sorrows and Exeter Hall monstrosities, just now. But a problem which must be entered upon, and by degrees be completed. A problem which, I think, the English people also, if they mean to retain human colonies, and not black Irelands in addition to the whites, cannot begin too soon. What are the true relations between negro and white, their mutual duties under the sight of the Maker of them both; what human laws will assist both to comply more and more with these? The solution, only to be gained by earnest endeavor, and sincere reading of experience, such as have never yet been bestowed on it, is not yet here; the solution is perhaps still distant. But some approximation to it, various real approximations, could be made and must be made: this of declaring that negro and white are unrelated, loose from one another, on a footing of perfect equality, and subject to no law but that of supply and demand according to the dismal science; this, which contradicts the palpablest facts, is clearly no solution, but a cutting of the knot asunder; and every hour we persist in this is leading us towards dissolution instead of solution!
