Wherever the Northerner has passed in the Southern States, misery, desolation, and death have followed. in his track. More than anywhere else has this been the case in Louisiana, where he has not only passed through, but planted his foot, and endeavoured to settle. The whites have generally derived increased energy from the indignation which these oppressions excite, and their character has been rather strengthened than weakened thereby. With the poor blacks it has been different. There are frightful accounts from Northern sources of the state of negroes in the Federal camps in that region. They are told, poor wretches, that they are free, under the President's proclamation; but that freedom does not mean freedom to be idle, and that they must make themselves useful in the way that they are directed. Consequently they are obliged to work much more than they were allowed by law to work before, and then huddled together, men, women, and children, in the most wretched and unhealthy abodes, where no sort of care is taken of them, and no sort of supervision exercised over them. Quantities of these miserable beings are collected by the Northern troops in the plundering raids which they make about the country, by the simple process of shooting them if they refuse to come; and they are driven together into these places, often the unhealthiest in the country, in the swamps of the Mississippi; and there, ill-lodged, illclad, over-worked, under-fed, and demoralised to a frightful extent, they learn to appreciate the benevolence of their Northern deliverers, and to bless the name of Abraham Lincoln. I should not have ventured to use this strong language only on Southern authority; but it rests on the testimony of Northerners. These camps are instances at once of a pandemonium and of a charnel-house. Enough of this. slavery arguments. Now let us look at the pro- They two. The first is as follows: "It is ridiculous to talk of emancipating the blacks. They are not fit for it, and what is more, they never will be. are physiologically incapable of it. The anatomical study of the negro's brain shows him to be of a different order from the white race. You may, if you please, call him a man, for he certainly is one, as a donkey belongs to the genus horse. But for all that you will never make a donkey the equal of a horse; and you never will make a negro the equal of a white man. Anatomy and physiology have been interrogated, and the response is, that the African or Canaanite is unfitted," so at least says Dr Cartwright, "from his organisation, and the physiological laws predicated in that organisation, for the responsible duties of a free man. It is the defective hematosis or atmo spherisation of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium, and an excess of nervous matter distributed to the organs of sensation and assimilation, that is the true cause of that debasement of mind which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves. Indeed," he adds, "religion forces us to believe that the negro race ought to be held in servitude; else, what is the meaning of the text, Cursed be Canaan ! a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren." "Well, my friend," is the answer, "we are not to trouble ourselves about fulfilling Scripture prophecies. If they are inspirations from heaven, they will fulfil themselves without our assistance. And to make slaves of the blacks in order to keep up the credit of Scripture, is like keeping the Romans under the Pope's paternal misgovernment, in order to prove that it is the manifest destiny of the Church to have temporalities. But putting that aside, what right have you to call this text you quoted a Scripture prophecy? Does it come from Isaiah, or Ezekiel, or Malachi? Is it not rather the expression of Noah's anger, uttered when awaking from a drunken sleep? And, further, who told you that the negroes were the descendants of Canaan? The Canaanites of the Bible and of the old Egyptian records are not represented as negroes. They seem to have been more like Arabs. In fact, the Egyptian records prove this abundantly. The same Pharaoh often had wars with both the Canaanite and the negro. So far from their being identical, they were respectively situated on opposite sides of Egypt, so that the Osirtasen or Rameses had to go northwards to get at one and southwards to get at the other. And in their paintings the negroes are of course represented as being black. The skins of the Canaanites are coloured yellow." The mention of the Egyptian records brings to our mind another argument, which we think of some force. "I can't answer your sonorous physiological argument, as I have no knowledge of the science. But if we may trust the hieroglyphic inscriptions, and the mural pictures of Egypt, we shall find that, in spite of the want of cerebral matter in their crania, the negroes had attained four thousand years ago a place in civilisation, and even in art, equal to those of the foremost nations at that time, and that at a period when the remote ancestors of the dominant race, which now condemns them to perpetual inferiority, were not Americans, were not English, were not Anglo-Saxons, were hardly even Teutons, but were just beginning to take the first steps in the career of civilisation; just beginning to exchange the pastoral for the agricultural life in the home which they shared with the forefathers of the Celt and the Sclavonian, the Greek and the Latin, on the skirts of the Hindoo Koosh, and in the valleys of the Oxus and the Jaxartes. It is true that the African has fallen almost as far below the level of his ancestors of those days, as the Anglo-American has risen above the level of his; and it is fair to make any use that you can of this fact for the purposes of argument. But let us hear no more of hematosis and cerebral matter." Having answered to the best of our power the first and the most confident of the advocates of slavery, let us listen to the argument of the second. It is a more specious one. "The blacks," says the Southerner, are very well off as slaves. There may be individual cases of tyranny, as there are everywhere; but cruelty is strictly forbidden by law, and, what is of more importance, by public opinion. A man who ill-treats his negroes, is looked upon as unfit for the society of gentlemen. Not only do the laws provide that the slaves (if you insist on the term-we do not use it ourselves) shall not be cruelly used, but they require that they shall not be made to work more than a specified time; that they shall be properly clothed and fed, and have medical attendance when required. In fact," he adds, "I wish we could have white free labour down here. It would be much cheaper. I believe our negroes are the happiest and most contented race of mortals on the face of the globe. They have G |