decisions do not come by a show of hands, or a counting of heads. We think as we have said, that a decided preponderance of authority to-day is for the Unity of the Race. It may, however, be otherwise. But when science settles this question, as it has settled a great many others, definitely and finally, we shall be likely to know it. Till then we will abide by the doctrine, that "God hath made of one blood, all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth." CHAPTER IX. THE QUESTION OF THE HOUR, WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE BLACKS? ON this closing chapter, we wish to offer a few thoughts of a moral and practical nature rather than historical. We have in this land some four millions of people, the descendants of an alien race, brought hither for purposes of slavery. Quite a large portion of those thus enumerated claim their descent, also, from our own race. Our own blood is flowing freely through their veins. Taken as a whole, with all their mixtures and varieties of color, they constitute a nation within a nation. If there is any fault in their being here, it certainly is not their own. The bitterness of that cup of which they have been made to drink, in their transfer to these shores, what tongue shall tell? Theirs have been the suffering, the sorrow, the anguish. The wickedness, the fiendish barbarism of the whole transaction, belong largely to men of our own complexion. In their long servitude, they have been subjected to a severity of rules and regulations, unpracticed and unknown, for the most part, in the slavery of the early world. In those ancient lands, there was no such disparity existing between the slaves and the great body of the people, as with us. Slavery was but a natural appendage to a coarse, material, semi-barbarous civilization, and no such iron restrictions were necessary. The victor of to-day, might be the vanquished to-morrow, and his own turn might come for the style of bondage which he meted out to others. Consequently, all along through these periods of ancient his tory, we see slaves, one by one, emerging from their servile condition, to hold the most honorable places in the lands of their captivity. Joseph is carried into Egypt a slave; but by his wisdom, prudence, and faithfulness, and by the special care of God over him, he rises to be prime minister of the kingdom. Daniel and his companions in Babylon were slaves; but there was no inexorable law to hinder their rising, and so they became, at length, the chief men of the empire. Esther was a captive maid, and an orphan in the land of Persia, but she was taken by the haughty Ahasuerus to be his queen, and she exerted an influence over his tyrant mind such as would have been strange and unusual even for a native-born Persian queen. All along through the Grecian and Roman periods, it was no rare thing for slaves, by their skill and enterprise, to achieve for themselves the most honorable positions in society. The freedmen, the Liberti, and the Libertini of the Roman Empire constituted important classes of the population. And all this, too, among nations that had not paraded before the world any "glittering generalities," as they have been called, about the natural equality of all men. Almost the only slavery of ancient times that absolutely degraded the individual as near as might be to the level of the brute was, as has already been said, the helotism of Sparta. No such lenity has marked our American system. No amount of talent, or goodness, or enterprise, or skill, under our laws, could gain for a slave any public recognition and promotion. He has lived under a perpetual ban. No matter how nearly he might approach in blood to the white race, no matter how eminent he might be in worth and intelligence. The stigma was upon him, and he could not escape from it. In |