caped from the power of Pharaoh. Even in private life the tradition of wrong done to the father often produces a bitterer animosity on the part of the children than in the mind of the injured party. A hundred years hence the hardships and wrong of slavery will constitute a stronger impulse to united action on the part of the colored race than they do to-day. It would be inconsistent with every principle of human nature if, even after the lapse of centuries, the colored orator and poet did not dwell upon the wrongs of their forefathers with a fervor and intensity that would surprise the recipient of the wrongs described. The colored man who to-day looks back upon slavery with feelings very far removed from unmixed bitterness will have great-grandchildren to whom the wrongs which he has suffered will constitute a ceaseless impulse to concerted action with their fellows in the interests of their race.

Besides this, it is an inflexible rule of development that the inferior class when free has always an upward tendency and inclination to rise and become, sooner or later, the dominant power. The slave has nothing to hope for and no impulse to exertion; but no sooner does he become free than the avenues to wealth and ambition open more

or less clearly for him. It may be generations before the race is able to improve its new-found opportunity. It may be that but one colored man in a State has achieved financial independence in a decade, yet that one man is an example to all others, constantly stimulating them to renewed exertion. It may be that in a whole State but one or two colored men have won their way into the mystic arena of the bar, and even these may be far from encouraging examples of forensic ability, yet never one of them opens his lips in court that his example does not inspire some colored boy that listens to do as he has done. The same inclination to stand by each other and to make common cause in matters pertaining to the race, has led the people to associate together in churches of their own, their own lodges and protective unions, and the law has built for them a barrier around the schools. The freedman of the South is distinctly a negro from his birth and in every relation of life. It is the chief element in every phase of his existence. Religion, that is supposed to be the great mollifier of savage influences, has become in his case the promoter of differences. The slave, in the main, went with his master to church. In a city of ten thousand

people you will find to-day hardly ten colored faces in the white congregations.

This mutual isolation of the races must of necessity constantly increase. Already there are but two important relations of life in which the negro mingles with the white man on anything like a basis of equality. The one is as a laborer, where, indeed, his position is not equality, but superiority. The negro is par excellence the laborer of the South. The white man is compelled to work beside him, and feels himself humiliated by the fact. The other place where they are supposed to meet upon the level of right is at the ballot-box, where the white man regards him as an intruder. The colored man, as he goes farther away from the wrongs of slavery with the lapse of time, will feel all the more keenly the disabilities that still remain, and will become more and more suspicious of the race to which he not unnaturally attributes the woes of himself and his ancestors. The white man, as he watches what he deems the aggressions of the colored man, his acquisition of wealth and power, and his assumption of independent relations for himself and his race, will naturally be impelled still more strongly to maintain his own actual or

fancied superiority by whatever means may be necessary effectually to maintain a "white man's government" and the white man's right to rule throughout every State of the South.

If, therefore, the existing influences and forces which govern and control Southern life shall continue in their present relations, the point of general conflict must be reached sooner or later. The negro's struggles for equality of right and recognition as a potent factor in public affairs must some time become organized, general, and irresistible except by overwhelming force. At the same time the white man's resolution to keep him still in an inferior position, growing stronger and stronger by repeated successes, must eventually result in such organized repression as can be met only by organized retaliation. Whether there is any remedy which may avert this catastrophe it behooves us earnestly to inquire. If something be not done, and done quickly, the result is inevitable.

THE

HE imminency of this peril will, perhaps, be better understood when we consider the physical relations of the two races in that region which we call the South, or those States in which slavery still existed in the year 1860.

The first and simplest view of this subject is that which we obtain from the mere statement of the fact that there were in 1880 in the Southern States, including the District of Columbia and the Territory of New Mexico, 12,460,248 whites and 6,039,657 colored inhabit