the loathsome and degrading calling of rearing slaves for the markets of the extreme South; that the breeding of black human cattle was as favourite a pursuit with a landed proprietor in the Old Dominion, as breeding heifers or sheep might be with an English country gentleman, and that when this live stock was sufficiently plump and strong to labour in the rice-grounds or cotton-fields of Carolina or Tennessee, negro traders came to purchase the "likeliest young niggers," and took them away, shackled and manacled, to be sold into hopeless bondage down South. I was shown pictures of negroes whose backs had been lashed into one bleeding mass of mashed up muscle, or whose limbs were covered with the blisters raised by the paddle-who had been branded with their owner's initials on the forehead and on the cheek, whose ears had been clipped, whose nostrils slit, and whose tongues cut out. And, finally, I was told that these four millions of black people were sunk in the most abject and entire ignorance of every branch of knowledge, secular or divine-that it was a crime to teach them to read or writeand that missionaries who had attempted to preach the Word of God to them had been banished, cowhided, tarred-andcottoned, ridden on rails, hanged, and shot. And I was asked whether, as an Englishman and a Christian,—whether as the countryman of Clarkson, of Wilberforce, of Granville Sharpe, of Brougham, of Macaulay, and of Buxton—I could, for very shame, deny that these were horrors and these were scandals which cried aloud for abrogation, or that a nation who had undertaken to abrogate them was engaged in a righteous and a holy war.

I heard all these things. I heard and read too what the other side had to say and write. I could not penetrate into the Southern States; but I went to Cuba, and saw, during two visits to that island (I went to Mexico in the interval) negro slavery in full operation on the plantations on the factories. I do not pretend to know much about anything, but I claim to have studied the question of slavery for very many years with intense and concentrated industry-to have read nearly all that has been written on the subject-from Blue Books to Anti-Slavery Reporters-during the last fifty years; and, in early youth, to have had much viva voce instruction as to the practical working of slaveholders, for I came on the mother's side from a long line of West Indian Planters who owned slaves and did not torture them. When my mother, dear sir, was brought to England sixty years ago to be educated, there came over with her three black slave-women, and these women used to sit on the stairs all day in London, shivering, and crying to be sent back to Demerara. And slavery sixty years since, in British Guiana, was no joke.

These are the result of my studies. That I believe slavery to be an evil, and to a certain extent a curse: but that it is not a worse evil nor a worse curse than Prostitution, than Drunkenness, than Pauperism, than the tyranny of capital over labour, or than the greed for wealth and dominion. I believe that it is not half so great an evil and not half so great a curse as that Devil's own Game-War, and as that Devil's own creed which strives to preach the doctrine that there is a "God of Battles," and that Almighty God can, under any circumstances, look with aught save sorrow and abhorrence on the

spectacle of His creatures cutting one another's throats. And I believe that although cruelty to anything that lives parlant or mute, is wicked and detestable, the cruelties said to be inflicted by the Southerners on their bond servants are in the main gross and malevolent exaggerations, and that, in any case, it is better that a refractory negro should have a sound thrashing than that A. B., who never saw C. D. before in his life, and cannot possibly have the slightest grudge against him, should fall upon him, shoot him with bullets, rip up his bowels, stab him in the heart, or batter his brains. out, and call that Glorious War.

I believe that for thousands of years unavailing efforts have been made to civilise the black natives of Africa, and tha those efforts missionary enterprise and the Republic of Liberia notwithstanding-will continue to be unavailing. I believe that the negro in his own country is not to be civilised. I know that when the missionaries do get hold of him and teach him his Catechism and baptise him, his Christianity very soon deteriorates into a kind of Obeah worship grafted on Exeter Hallism, and that he howls out his " Glory Hallelujahrums" and his "Bress de Lord's" without the slightest idea of the real meaning of his invocations :-and that in fact the deity he invokes is only Mumbo Jumbo in a white choker. I believe that he is and has been ten thousand times better off as a bond-servant in the Southern States of America than as a free negro in the North, and ten million times better off as a negro, at all, in America, than as a denizen of Dahomey or Ashantee, and that if he is sometimes flogged and sometimes sold down South his blood is

not shed to fill a pond for a "great custom," and his skull is not scooped out to form a calabash for his sovereign to drink rum from. I believe that he is naturally inferior to the white man in mental organisation; that his defects and his vices are not to be eradicated by education; that he will always (in the aggregate: of course there are individual exceptions) be lazy, indolent, and slovenly, good-natured and kind-hearted, but subject to inexplicable fits of caprice, sulkiness, obstinacy, and perversity-willing and obedient only when he fears the eye or the hand of his master; inconceivably vain, trivial, and puerile :—always as lecherous as a monkey and often as savage as a Gorilla, and finally totally unconscious of or indifferent to the moral laws-let alone such legal enactments as teach that lying and stealing are wrong. I believe that this is the negro. I believe that he will make a capital sailor in a ship where there is a good boatswain, an excellent footman or coachman in a household where the master and mistress keep a tight hand over their servants, a valuable soldier under white officers and stern drill-sergeants (in time, and if he is strictly disciplined and smartly dressed, after the pattern of our West India regiments), a useful body servant, an active hotel waiter, and an incomparable barber. But I believe that he must always have a "boss" or a master or guide of some sort over him, with power to punish him when he misbehaves himself; and I believe that in default of this master, guide, or "boss," he will go to the Devil, as he has gone in Hayti, as he will go in Liberia, as he would go in Jamaica were not the magistrates and the police too strong for him, and as he has been going

in his own country, Africa, for I don't know how many

thousand years.

They told me when I came to America that the great heart of the country was set upon the destruction of slavery. Perish the Union, perish the country, perish every white man in it; but that eminently helpless dark-coloured person must be freed from the questionable oppression he has so long endured, and so contentedly suffered. He must have entire liberty-to do what? To dig trenches for the white engineer officer; or with his mangled body to make fascines and gabions for the white man's forts; or to wander about to pilfer, and starve, and rot, as he is doing just now with great regularity and despatch in a hundred places where he has been set free. The abolition of slavery, the Radicals maintain, is not to be left, as all humane and sensible men desire it should be, to another generation, happily free from the passions and the prejudices which disfigure the existing one. Able and patriotic but temperate men are not to be encoureged to devise a scheme whereby a great national evil may be gradually and equitably, but effectually, abolished. "No, no," the Radical cry runs; "slavery must go, hic et nunc. No compromise! no compensation! It must go. It is punctured in the spinal marrow. It is reeling and staggering like an ox that has been stricken with a pole-axe. Never mind those who may be crushed by the toppling down of its huge bulk. It is doomed, and it must die." So the negro is to receive forthwith his gift of the white elephantfreedom. I wonder "what will he do with it." Sir Bulwer Lytton would be puzzled to answer the question. I met