Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/476

Rh forbid her daughter to dance on a Sunday, yet perceive nothing offensive in compelling her slaves to work for her the whole of the Sunday to the music of the cracking whip; when I saw agreeable and amiable young people anxious one for another, yet witness with perfect indifference, the brutal maltreatment of a young negro-woman by her master for some trivial offence, I have been compelled to say with my friend the planter on the Mississippi, “It is the system! it is the system which produces all this!”

Honour be to the noble, warm-hearted American woman, who has stood forth in our day—as no other woman in the realms of literature has yet done—for the cause of humanity, and the honour of her native land; and that with a power which has won for her the whole ear of humanity. Honour and blessing be hers! What will not that people become who can produce such daughters!

I differ from the noble author of “Uncle Tom” in my convictions regarding the the mode of emancipation from slavery. I am firmly persuaded that the Slave States of America have really begun the work, inasmuch as they have begun to allow the negro slaves to form themselves into Christian communities, and by uniting emancipation with the colonisation of Africa by free-negroes. It is only by the establishment of Christian negro-communities that a good emancipation can be effected. The condition of the negroes in Africa and Jamaica shows what this people would become without a firm basis of Christian life and Christian teaching; it is nothing to praise, it has nothing inviting. I repeat it, a commencement is already made in several of the Slave States to elevate the moral condition of the negro-slaves, and my cordial wish and my hope is that still more will yet be done, as well by statutes of emancipation as by the instruction of negro children. The preachings of the slaves themselves, which I heard in many of the American Slave States, are the best proof of the living and beneficial manner in which they receive Christianity. They have a peculiar capacity for the reception of its innermost life and understanding. God grant that they may come to hear the Gospel throughout the whole of the Slave States! But as yet there is a great deal wanting for that—an unpardonably great deal!

My own hope rests still, however, as before in the nobler South; my earnest wish is that it may take the emancipation question into its own hand. It alone—and not England, nor yet the Northern States