to all his descendants;
and although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can obliterate the
traces of its existence.

The modern slave differs from his master not only in his condition,
but in his origin. You may set the negro free, but you cannot make him
otherwise than an alien to the European. Nor is this all; we scarcely
acknowledge the common features of mankind in this child of debasement
whom slavery has brought amongst us. His physiognomy is to our eyes
hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost
inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the
brutes. *e The moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have
three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack and
far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice
of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color.

[Footnote e: To induce the whites to abandon the opinion they have
conceived of the moral and intellectual inferiority of their former
slaves, the negroes must change; but as long as this opinion subsists,
to change is impossible.]

It is difficult for us, who have had the good fortune to be born amongst
men like ourselves by nature, and equal to ourselves by law, to conceive
the irreconcilable differences which separate the negro from the
European in America. But we may derive some faint notion of them from
analogy. France was formerly a country in which numerous distinctions of
rank existed, that had been created by the legislation. Nothing can be
more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority; nothing more contrary
to the instinct of mankind than these permanent divisions which had
been established between beings evidently similar. Nevertheless these
divisions subsisted for ages; they still subsist in many places; and
on all sides they have left imaginary vestiges, which time alone can
efface. If it be so difficult to root out an inequality which solely
originates in the law, how are those distinctions to be destroyed which
seem to be based upon the immutable laws of Nature herself? When I
remember the extreme difficulty with which aristocratic bodies, of
whatever nature they may be, are commingled with the mass of the people;
and the exceeding care which they take to preserve the ideal boundaries
of their caste inviolate, I despair of seeing an aristocracy disappear
which is founded upon visible and indelible signs. Those who hope that
the