s, and is ever ready to comfort the
sick or to stop her round of duties to give counsel or
render help along any line possible to the many young people
and others who seek her door.

The measure of the success of a race is the depths from which it has
come, and the condition under which it has developed. To know what the
Negro actually accomplished in the nineteenth century, one must know
something of his life and habitat previous to the year 1619, when
against his will or wish, he was brought to the Virginian coast; must
also know his life as a slave, and his opportunities since
emancipation.

History shows that the Negroes brought from Africa to this country to
be sold into slavery were at the time in a more or less primitive
stage of uncivilized life; while the methods used to capture and
transport them to this "land of the free and home of the brave,"
recently revived through the vivid pen pictures and other
illustrations running in serial form in Scribner's, Pearson's and
other reliable periodicals (accounts which bear the impress of truth,
and are hardly liable to the charge of having been written within too
close range of time and space, or vice versa, to be strictly
truthful), indicate the demoralizing and debasing effects of the
"system" from its initial period, this followed up by the blighting
influences of slave life, even under the most favorable conditions,
for nearly two hundred and fifty years, left upon Negro life and
character just the traits it would have left upon any other people
subjected to similar conditions for the same length of time.

It may be said, and with truth, that slavery gave to the Negro some of
the arts of civilized life; but it must be added, that, denying him
the inalienable rights of manhood, denying him the right to the
product of his labor, it left him no noble incentive to labor at these
arts, and thus tended to render him improvident, careless, shiftless,
in short, to demoralize his entire nature.

It is further stated that the system gave him Christianity. Did it
give him piety? Could it give him morality in the highest sense of
these terms?

Constantine could march the refractory Saxons to the banks of a stream
and give them their option between Christianity and the sword, but the
haughty monarch soon found that a religion forced in this peremptory
and wholesale fashion did not change the moral nature of the soldier;
and we submit that Christianity, lan