But because the African race is distinct from the white, does it follow that it is inferior By no means. That is a point not proved; nor has the day for fair comparison yet arrived. But even if it should appear that the white is superior in intellectual capacity, yet it is certain that the African is the superior in the nobler part of man — the heart. It is the testimony of Mungo Park, and of other travelers in Africa, that the negroes, even in their present uncultivated state, are a gentle, feeling, affectionate race. How many touching
from mixing science with religion, to the injury of. both, may be seen in the argument for the amalgamation of the African and European races, on the ground of their being one family, both descended from Adam and Eve. It belongs to science and to the common instincts and feelings of mankind to say, whether there are not races of men, so unlike in their temperaments as to prohibit, as nefarious and contrary to nature, the amalgamation of them. The identity and unity of the human family, imaged in Adam and Eve, is a religious; not a scientific truth; and any deductions made from it, to have any presumption of fairness, must be religious, not scientific. Thus, if from the unity of the human family, so acknowledged, it be argued that we owe to every race of mankind on the globe the same obligations of justice and mercy which we owe to each other, the argument would be a good one, and would brand those horrid acts of injustice of which the white race have been guilty, both to the black and to the red. But it may be safely affirmed, that had it not been for the debasement of the moral sense, the result of such injustice, the natural repugnance to amalgamation among these races, particularly between the black and the white, would have been such, that it could never have taken place under any circumstances. But men having first lost all sense of shame, in destroying the natural birth-right of freedom in a distinct branch of the human family, no wonder this second curse-an unnatural confusion of races — has followed on the back of the other, and that we should be about to incur this sad penalty of the transgression of the natural laws of justice and humanity. The Copts, or modern Egyptians, are a mixed race of Negroes and Caucasians, and hence their degradation." — Twelve Lectures on the Natural History of Man, p. 152, by Alex. Kinmont, A.M., Cincinnati, 1838.
