Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/267

Rh There is, however, one among these efforts to which I desire pre-eminently to direct your Majesty's eye, both because it proceeds from the womanly and maternal element in the community, and because it is the grain of mustard-seed, which although a small seed, may yet grow into a large tree and spread its shadow far around.

I know in the Slave States some young girls, the daughters and sisters of planters who are not ashamed of keeping schools themselves for the children of the slaves on the plantation, and of teaching them to pray, to think, and work. They speak highly of the powers of mind, and the willingness to learn, of the negro children, especially when knowledge is presented to them in a living and pleasing form by means of narratives and pictures.

If the young daughters of the Southern States would generally imitate this good example, they would do more than any legislation to prepare the way for a happy emancipation; for emancipation might take place without any detriment either to the black or the white population, if the slave had been educated from his youth upwards by love, and habituated to the fear of God, to order and labour: and I participate fully in the views of an elderly man of the South, that the possibility of an approaching emancipation from slavery is much more in the hands of the women than of the men, at the present moment.

I have spoken of the young teachers from the States of New England, the daughters of the Pilgrims, as “the young mothers of humanity.” The young women of the Southern States have assigned to themselves a similar office, and that nearer home, yes, so near and so natural, that it seems to me assigned to them by God the Father Himself.

It is an universal custom on the plantations of the South, that while the slaves, men and women, are out at labour, the children should all be collected at one place, under the care of one or two old women. I have sometimes