at "niggers won't work"; and I
suspect the cry may not be without reason. Industrious citizens can
never be made in a community where the higher class think useful labor a
disgrace. The whites will oppose the negro in every effort to rise; they
will debar him of every civil and social right; they will set him the
worst possible example, as they have been doing for hundreds of years;
and then they will hound and hiss at him for being what they made him.
This is the old track of the world,--the good, broad, reputable road on
which all aristocracies and privileged classes have been always
travelling; and it's not likely that we shall have much of a secession
from it. The Millennium isn't so near us as that, by a great deal."

"It's all very well arguing from human selfishness and human sin in that
way," said I; "but you can't take up a newspaper that doesn't contain
abundant facts to the contrary. Here, now,"--and I turned to the
Tribune,--"is one item that fell under my eye accidentally, as you were
speaking:--

"'The Superintendent of Freedmen's Affairs in Louisiana, in making up
his last Annual Report, says he has 1,952 blacks settled temporarily on
9,650 acres of land, who last year raised crops to the value of
$175,000, and that he had but few worthless blacks under his care, and
that, as a class, the blacks have fewer vagrants than can be found among
any other class of persons.'

"Such testimonies gem the newspapers like stars."

"Newspapers of your way of thinking, very likely," said Theophilus; "but
if it comes to statistics, I can bring counter statements, numerous and
dire, from scores of Southern papers, of vagrancy, laziness,
improvidence, and wretchedness."

"Probably both are true," said I, "according to the greater or less care
which has been taken of the blacks in different regions. Left to
themselves, they tend downward, pressed down by the whole weight of
semi-barbarous white society; but when the free North protects and
guides, the results are as you see."

"And do you think the free North has salt enough in it to save this
whole Southern mass from corruption? I wish I could think so; but all I
can see in the free North at present is a raging, tearing, headlong
chase after _money_. Now money is of significance only as it gives
people the power of expressing their ideal of life. And what does this
ideal prove to be among us? Is it not to ape all the splendors and vices
of old aristocratic society?