ad, as well as the comic, phases of life on the
Southern plantations, as they then existed, are vividly remembered by
Booker Washington. Of course, to the slaves themselves very much
depended on the disposition of their owners, or on the character of the
overseers which those planters employed. The lot of Booker Washington
was what may be called an average one. It was not so bad as that of many
others who were less fortunate; nor was it so good as the exceptional
experience of the few who were born amid the most favourable
surroundings. It was, of course, a sad childhood, unrelieved by anything
like what we should in Great Britain call the comforts of life. He was a
keen-witted lad; but the shrewdest of seers could not have foreseen that
he would develop into the man of hope whom the negroes, after their
coming emancipation, would most sorely need.

At the time of his birth, some forty-three or forty-four years ago--the
exact place or time being alike unknown--the public sentiment in regard
to emancipation had made great advances, and this had been effected
chiefly through the diffusion of millions of copies of Mrs H. B. Stowe's
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_. Among those in this country who believed the
descriptions in that work to be exaggerated, and that Legree was a
non-existent character, we have to include Charles Dickens. At the same
time, that famous novelist, in common with some others, probably
clearly saw that the days of slavery were numbered. "In truth, it must
be so," remarked one journalist at the time when _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was
the most popular book both in the Old and the New World. "In truth, it
must be so, for the very laws of population forbid the permanence of
slavery in America. The black man thrives where the white man decays,
and it is the knowledge of this very remarkable fact that in great part
accounts for the dislike to the coloured population which is everywhere
expressed in the United States." The social inequality of the negroes
and the whites struck people then, as it does to-day in this country, as
being one of the most marked features of American society. There is
probably no remedy for that state of things, and it is partly through
his recognising this fact, and knowing that the negroes must continue to
be a race by themselves, that Booker Washington's success has been what
it is.

Meanwhile, what kind of existence was the everyday life on a plantation
"down South" in the days of Booker Washin