Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/76

70 support. As the case at present stands, the possibility of curing the indolence and the ferocity of the whites at the South is a much graver question. The negroes made good soldiers when they were well commanded; and when they have been fairly tried they have made industrious workmen. The late war, by putting their masters in many places into their power, gave their ferocity full play; yet I believe there was scarcely a single well-attested instance of negro revenge. If the race had been really ferocious they would not have been slaves; to make the Red Indian a slave would be no easy task. This figment of indelible inferiority has been coined against oppressed nations as well as against oppressed races; ever since the days of the ancient slave-owner, who held the fathers of great European nations in bondage as indelibly his inferiors, it has been the well-known stock-in-trade of philosophic rapine. It is not in the hopeless defects of the negro that the difficulty lies; it is in the relations between the master and slave race when they are set to live together as fellow citizens. And this is a problem of which (though perhaps we may see the dawn of success in the changed position which, partly in consequence of the exigencies of the war itself, industry has assumed at the South, and in the probable influx of Northern employers at least into the Middle States) we can only watch the solution with intense sympathy and interest. Providence is inexhaustible; and in the New World many things are new. A way may yet be found to form out of the two races, and by a combination of their different faculties and powers, a society, different perhaps in its structure from Northern society, yet equally based on justice.

If this had been a mere struggle for empire, it would