hear even a whisper of legislative corruption, and of late even the time honoured practice of bribing constituencies is being resolutely suppressed. When things get to the worst they mend, and the time must be close at hand when a nation which aspires to lead the van of freedom and civilisation, must be honest and require honesty. The most hideous spectacle any country can show to the world is to fill its highest offices with its greatest scoundrels.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE NEGRO.

DESCENDANTS of African negroes, of pure or mixed blood, constitute about one-eighth of the entire population of the United States, and most of them, at the beginning of the war of secession, were held in slavery.

I have seen much of negroes, bond and free, and of people of colour of all shades, from the Ethiop, shining black, to the faintly-bronzed Octoroon, in whom a tinge of the white of the eye, or a finger nail, is the only perceptible mark of the warm blood of Africa. We know something of the condition of the negro in Ashantee and Dahomey, in Cuba and Brazil, in the British West Indies and in Hayti; but it is my business to describe his condition as I have seen it, North and South, in freedom and slavery, in the American States.

No one has satisfactorily accounted for the dislike of the negro which exists in the Northern States of America. It is not a question of colour, for the prejudice exists almost equally against the lightest mulatto and the blackest negro; and there is no such feeling against other coloured races. Some of the Americans themselves are very swarthy-darker than the

mulattoes they despise. They have no feeling against a dark Spaniard, an East Indian, a Moor, or one of their own aborigines. There are many Americans with an inter-mixture of Indian blood, who show it in their coarse and straight black hair, high cheek bones, and coppery tinge of the complexion; and they are rather proud of the savage alliance. It is no discredit to them with their fellow citizens. The first families of Virginia are proud of their descent from the Indian Princess, Pocahontas. But let it be known that there is even one infinitesimal drop of the blood of Central Africa flowing in the veins of an American, and it were better for that man that he had never been born.

In some of the Northern States of the American Republic, before the war, a few negroes were allowed to vote. It was the only evidence of their citizenship; almost the only one of a popular recognition of their humanity. Who ever saw a coloured man on a jury; or elected to the lowest office; or until the exigencies of civil war made it necessary, "training" in a military company? In New York, the negro never rode in an omnibus. It was a very low grog-shop into which he dared to enter. Dressed in all the splendour of apparel in which he loves to indulge, he was not allowed to eat in any restaurant or oyster cellar frequented by white people, even if it were kept by one of his coloured brethren. There are a hundred hotels in New York which can accommodate from fifty to a thousand guests, but there is not one of these at which a man of African blood could find a bed or a meal. His only place in any of these establishments was that of cook or waiter. He might cook every meal; he could not eat one out of the kitchen. might stand behind the chair; but not sit at the table. A negro might drive to a theatre in his private carriage, and have money enough to buy the establishment; but he could not get admission to boxes, or pit, nor even to the third tier, set apart for fallen women. His only place was the gallery, and in many

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cases he was railed off, even in this, from the lowest class of the white population.

In New York, a favourite amusement of the young men is a march out of town, with a band of music, to fire at a target. These target excursions are not confined to military companies. Every company of firemen had its annual target excursion, and the workmen of large manufacturing establishments, at least once a year, shouldered their rifles, borrowed for the occasion, and with a military band, often as numerous as themselves, marched up or down Broadway, toward some convenient shooting-ground. After every company was carried the target they were expected to riddle with their bullets, and this target was invariably carried by the biggest, and blackest, and best looking negro who could be hired for the occasion. So, in a military funeral procession, the horse of the defunct hero was always led through the streets by a negro groom.

Notwithstanding the progress of abolition sentiment in the Northern States, the great majority of Americans shrink from personal contact, or social intercourse, with any person of the African race, or tinged with African blood. It is only within a few years that negroes have been permitted to sit in the common pews of Northern churches. It was, a few years ago, the universal custom in the New England churches to confine the coloured people to pews set apart for them, called the "nigger seats," in a far corner of the gallery, where "Ethiopia" might "stretch forth her hands to God" without disgusting her sensitive Anglo-Saxon neighbours. The first church in which I ever saw black and white kneeling side by side as equals before God, was the old Roman Catholic Cathedral in New Orleans.

In New York, some years ago, Mr. P. T. Barnum had a clever boy who brought him lots of money as a dancer of negro break-downs; made up, of course, as a negro minstrel, with his face well blackened, and a woolly wig. One day Master

Diamond, thinking he might better himself, danced away into the infinite distance.

Barnum, full of expedients, explored the dance-houses of the Five Points and found a boy who could dance a better breakdown than Master Diamond. It was easy to hire him; but he was a genuine negro; and there was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.

To any man but the originator of Joyce Heth, the venerable negro nurse of Washington, and the manufacturer of the Fiji Mermaid, this would have been an insuperable obstacle. Barnum was equal to the occasion. Son of the State of white oak cheeses and wooden nutmegs, he did not disgrace his lineage. He greased the little "nigger's" face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burnt cork, painted his thick lips with vermilion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks, and brought him out as the "champion nigger-dancer of the world." Had it been suspected that the seeming counterfeit was the genuine article, the New York Vauxhall would have blazed with indignation.

Whatever may be the nature or causes of this teeling, it was a few years ago almost universal in the Northern States; and even now when there are negroes in Congress, and when they rule some States, I believe there are very few white men in America who could contemplate the idea of having a son-in-law with negro blood in his veins, without a feeling of horror.

Coloured persons in Northern cities, suffering continually from this proscription of race, sometimes make efforts to evade it. I have often met in Wall Street, New York, a speculator in stocks, who, by means of a well made wig, passed himself off as a West Indian creole of Spanish descent. He even married a white American wife-I presume, by the same false pretence. He was, however, a genuine mulatto, and the fact could not be concealed from careful observers. I have seen several persons

with negro blood who have resorted more or less successfully to similar expedients.

It is notorious that the shrinking antipathy of the white to the black race does not exist in the same degree in the formerly slave as in the free States. The white Southern babe is received into the arms of a black nurse, who, in many cases, becomes his foster-mother. Negro children are the playmates of his childhood. Negro servants attend to his hourly wants, and nurse him in sickness. He is born, and lives and dies among them, and often his most faithful and cherished friend is a negro. As Jefferson Davis said in his speech at Memphis, in 1874, "Every Southern man in his memory runs back to the negro woman who nursed him; to the boy who hunted and fished with him; to the man who first taught him to ride and swim; and, as he grew to manhood, the cordial welcome given him by the old nurse, with a tenderness scarcely inferior to that of his own mother; and while he has such memories clustering around him, he cannot be the enemy to that useful race which was the main strength of our country." If there be a natural antipathy of races, it dies out under these circumstances. The result has

been that not only the slaves but the free negroes were better treated in the South than in the North.

For example, there was a corps of free negroes in New Orleans, who joined in the public procession on the 8th of January, to celebrate the defence of the city by General Jackson. At Mobile, Alabama, the free coloured young men formed a favourite company of the Volunteer Fire Brigade, which celebrated its anniversary with great ceremony. Such a Fire Company, officers and men of negro blood, would not have been tolerated in any Northern city. In the same beautiful town I was present at an exhibition of an excellent school of young misses of colour, of the lighter shades indeed, and mixed with the Creole French, and Spanish blood-such a school as could not be found in the whole Northern States. They formed