themselves as the favored of mankind because of the competence and faithfulness of their slaves. The African spirit and character had disappeared, and in their place were coming into being the elements of a new character, existing in 1860 purely in a negative form. The slave had become an American. He was now a civilized slave, and had received his civilization from his masters. He had separated himself very far from his brother slave in St. Domingo. The Haytian Negro fought and won his freedom before he had been civilized in slavery, and hence has never passed over the same ground that his American fellow-servant has been compelled to traverse.

Beside the slaves in the South, there were also several thousand "free persons of color," as they were called, dwelling in such cities as Richmond, Va., Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans, La. Some of these had become quite wealthy and well-educated, forming a distinct class of the population. They were called Creoles in Louisiana, and were accorded certain privileges, although laws were carefully enacted to keep alive the distinction between them and the whites. In Charleston the so-called colored people set themselves up as a class, prided themselves much upon their color and hair and in their sympathies joined almost wholly with the master class. Representatives of their class became slave-holders and were in full accord with the social policy of the country. Nevertheless their presence was an encouragement to the slave, and consequently was objected to by the slave-holder. The free colored man became more and more disliked in the South as the slave became more civilized. He was supposed by his example to contribute to the discontent of the slave, and laws were passed restricting his priveleges so as to induce him to leave. Between 1850 and 1860 this question reached a crisis and free colored people from the South were to be seen taking up their homes in the Northern States and in Canada. (Many of the people, especially from Charleston, carried with them all their belittling prejudices, and after years of sojourn under the sway of enlightened and liberal ideas, proved themselves still incapable of learning the new way or forgetting the old.)

There were, then, three very distinct classes of colored people in the country, to wit: The slave in the South, the free colored people of the South, and the free colored people of the North. These were also sub-divided into several smaller classes. Slaves were divided into field hands, house servants and city slaves. The free colored people of the South had their classes based usually on color; the free colored people of the North had their divisions caused by differences in religion, differences as to place of birth, and numerous family conceits. So that surveyed as a whole, it is extremely difficult to get anything like a complete social map of these four millions as they existed at the outbreak of the Civil War.

For a quarter of a century there had been a steady concentration of the slave population within the cotton and cane-growing region, the grain-growing States of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia having become to a considerable extent breeding farms. Particularly was this the case with the more intelligent and higher developed individual slaves who appeared near the border line. The master felt that such persons would soon make their escape by way of the "Underground Railroad" or otherwise, and hence in order to prevent a total loss, would follow the dictates of business prudence and sell his bright slave man to Georgia. The Maryland or Virginia slave who showed suspicious aspirations was usually checked by the threat, "I'll sell you to Georgia;" and if the threat did not produce the desired reformation it was not long before the ambitious slave found himself in the gang of that most despised and most despicable of all creatures, the Georgia slave-trader. Georgia and Canada were the two extremes of the slave's anticipation during the last decade of his experience. These stood as his earthly Heaven and Hell, the "Underground Railroad," with its agents, conducting to one, and the odious slave-trader, driving men, women and children, to the other. No Netherlander ever hated and feared the devil more thoroughly than did the slaves of the border States hate and fear these outrages on mankind, the kidnapping slave-traders of the cotton and cane regions. I say kidnapping, for I have myself seen persons in Georgia who had been kidnapped in Maryland. If the devil was ever incarnate, I think it safe to look for him among those who engaged in the slave-trade, whether in a foreign or domestic form.

Nothing is more striking in connection with the history of American Slavery than the conduct of Great Britain on the same subject. So inconsistent has this conduct been that it can be explained only by regarding England as a conglomerate of two elements nearly equal in strength, of directly opposite character, ruling alternately the affairs of the nation. As a slave-trader and slave-holder England was perhaps even worse than the United States. Under her rule the slave decreased in numbers, and remained a savage. In Jamaica, in St. Vincent, in British Guiana, in Barbadoes, in Trinidad and in Grenada, British slavery was far worse than American slavery. In these colonies "the slave was generally a barbarian, speaking an unknown tongue, and working with men like himself, in gangs with scarcely a chance for improvement." An economist says, had the slaves of the British colonies been as well fed, clothed, lodged, and otherwise cared for as were those of the United States, their number at emancipation would have reached from seventeen to twenty millions, whereas the actual number emancipated was only 660,000. Had the blacks of the United States experienced the same treatment as did those of the British colonies, 1860 would have found among us less than 150,000 colored persons. In the United States were found ten colored persons for every slave imported, while in the British colonies only one was found for every three imported. Hence the claim that the American Negro is a new race, built up on this soil, rests upon an ample supply of facts. The American slave was born in our civilization, fed upon good American food, housed and clothed on a civilized plan, taught the arts and language of civilization, acquired necessarily ideas of law and liberty, and by 1860 was well on the road toward fitness for freedom. No lessons therefore drawn from the emancipation of British slaves in the West Indies are of any direct value to us, inasmuch as British slavery was not like American slavery, the British freedman was in no sense the equal of the American freedman, and the circumstances surrounding the emancipation of the British slave had nothing of the inspiring and ennobling character with those connected with the breaking of the American Negro's chains. Yet, superior as the American Negro was as a slave, he was very far below the standard of American citizenship as subsequent events conclusively proved. The best form of slavery, even though it may lead toward fitness for freedom, can never be regarded as a fit school in which to graduate citizens of so magnificent an empire as the United States.

The slave of 1860 was perhaps, all things considered, the best slave the world had ever seen, if we except those who served the Hebrews under the Mosaic statutes. While there was no such thing among them as legal marriage or legitimate childhood, yet slave "families" were recognized even on the auction block, and after emancipation legal family life was erected generally upon relationships which had been formed in slavery. Bishop Gaines, himself born a slave of slave parents, says: "The Negro had no civil rights under the codes of the Southern States. It was often the case, it is true, that the marriage ceremony was