Deducting from this latter table the slaves, the emigrants, and children born of emigrants, now included in it, and the ratio of increase is below 27 per cent every ten years.  So that if anything should occur to check the tide of emigration, the blacks in this country would increase in a faster ratio than the whites.

We can form some idea as to the danger of such a check, when we advert to the fact that the emigration which in 1854 was 427,833, fell off in 1858 to 144,652.

To finish the picture which these figures present to us, let us carry the mind forward a decade or two.  At the average rate of increase of the blacks, namely, 28 per cent, we shall have, of the slave population alone, and excluding the free blacks, 5,060,585 in 1870, and 6,577,584 in 1880.  And by that time they will be increasing at the rate of 150,000 to 200,000 a year.

Carl Schurz, in his speech at the Cooper Institute, in New-York, put to his audience a pertinent inquiry:  ’You ask me, What shall we do with our negroes, who are now 4,000,000?  And I ask you, What will you do with them when they will be 8,000,000—­or rather, what will they do with you? Surely, surely the question involves the greatest problem of the age.

If our fathers had met the question seventy years ago, we should not now behold the spectacle of 6,000,000 of our people in rebellion, and an army of 400,000 men arrayed against the integrity of the Union.  And we may well profit by the example so far as to ask ourselves the question, What will be the condition of our country and of our posterity, fifty years hence, if we, too, shirk the question as painful and difficult of solution?

Whether ultimate and universal emancipation will be one of the necessary modes of dealing with it, time must show.  In the mean time there is a question immediately pressing upon us.  Day by day our armies are advancing among them, and every news of a contest that comes, brings us accounts of the swarms of ‘contrabands’ who are flocking to us for protection.  At one place alone, Port Royal, S.C., the Government Agent reports that there are at least fifteen thousand slaves deserted by their masters, and thus practically emancipated.  Untaught and unwonted to take care of themselves—­our armies consuming the fruits of the earth and finding no employment for these ’National Freedmen’—­the danger is great that want, and temptation, and the absence of the government to which they have been accustomed, may yet drive them to become lawless hordes, preying on all.

The same state of things must of necessity exist wherever the slave-owner flies from the approach of our armies; and we have now presented to us the alternative of either allowing their state to be worse by reason of their emancipation, or better, according as the wise and the humane among us may deal with the subject.