The age-herald., 1897-11-14
BY JOHN W. DUBosB.


It is indeed peculiar, the anxiety and still the uncertainty in which the mind working race. the whites. view the origin of the coIored races. Burton tells in his ever green and wonderful Anatomy of Melancholy that earlier students along this fine considered that Adam must nave had several wives, all of diff felrent types. Eve being the latest gift to him and the best. Caan it is ad- nfttedb found a wife outside of Eden Descendants of Adam many generations after him were polygamGsts.
 Am amusing co-dncident dn newspaper items took place last Sunday. Tn a dis tant part of the country the venerable anti-slavery agitator and missionary, Eli Thayer, of Massachusetts, wrote a start ling revelation of the meaning of his ac- tive course fifty years ago Thayer was a very intelligent promoter of John Brown, Lincoln and the "higher law agencies all the way through. The end justifies the means was tlle axiom of his set of statesmen. He seems now to have been the most rational of the lot. Under date, Feb. 25. 1897, this still hale old man wrote a personal letter to Bar ton H. Wise, of Richmond, Va, alleging that he had never been an abolitionlst except for the one reason that slavery in the south, effectively multiplying and building up the negro race by syste- matic kindness and practical protection at the hands of interested masters, was a menace to whlite supremacy in the United States
 Thayer says he knew the natural ten- dency of the black race was decline, dn contact with civilization and he wanted nature to have it's way. He looked over into Africa and he found the race there had decreased at least 100000, ,000 from the numbers of 200 years before. He determined the owners of negroes on the southern plantations should not be per- mlitted to propagate @ degraded race by a kind of hot house system of rearing on hog and hominy, that if left alone would cease to multiply and cease to compete with white men for the high privileges of enlightened existence in America. Thay- er says now that he put himself at the head of a gigantic colonization move ment, supported by New England capi- tad, to colonize with Europeans the ter a.toa.ies of the west to keep the negroes out and that he succeeded also fin colon- izing that splendid section of Virginia that proved disloyaI to the state and the Confederate States, creating the pres ent state of West Virginia. He says he was engaged in the labor of saving the south first and the republic eventually from negro contamination. He is now we'll persuaded of the final success of his scheme White people are increasing in the south twice as fast as the negroes. According to Thayer he was the original black belt politician.
 Thayer to the contrary, the social sys- tenn of the south was inherently the strongest and happfest the world ever saw. It was strong enough to mature, correct or dispose of negro bondage. There was @ party in the first constitu- tfonal convention of Alabama, in 1919, opposed to the admission of any more negroes into It1Ia state. Considerations of pure economy would have set all slaves free in this state at an early day. Thayer Brown and Lincoln compelled us to fight for time to rdpen our own dn- stitutions for reform by our own pro- cesses. We were too great to refuse the challenge.
 Last Sunday The Age-Herald published a circumstantial report of a new negiro colony at Cedar Lake, near Decatur Ala It Is out of line with Thayers views. It seems that professional hu- manitarian, Mrs. Ray by name. of some foreign origin, now residing in that vii cinity, leads off in procuring 367 acres of