ast bulk of evidence already accumulated,
all demonstrating the freedmen's willingness to work. Yet if the
assumption be false, any system founded on it must be regarded by the
freedmen as an insult, and must fail, unless greatly modified.

In organizing emancipation, one great principle must be kept steadily in
mind. All men will better endure the total withholding of all their
rights than a system which concedes half and keeps back the other half.
This has been admirably elucidated by De Tocqueville in his "Ancien
Regime," in showing that the very prosperity of the reign of Louis XVI.
prepared the way for its overthrow. "The French found their position the
more insupportable, the better it became.... It often happens that a
people which has endured the most oppressive laws without complaint, and
as if it did not feel them, throws them off violently the instant the
burden is lightened,... and experience shows that the most dangerous
moment to a bad government is usually that in which it begins to mend.
The evil which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable
as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping it. All that is then taken
from abuses seems to uncover what remains, and render the feeling of it
more poignant. The evil has become less, it is true, but the sensibility
is keener."

Every one who is familiar with the freedmen knows that this could not be
a truer description of their case, if every word had been written
expressly for them. The most timid laborer on the remotest plantation
will not bear from his superintendent or his teacher the injustice he
bore from his master. The best-disciplined black soldier will not take
from his captain one half the tyranny which his overseer might safely
have inflicted. Freedom they understand; slavery they understand. When
they become soldiers, they know that part of their civil rights are to
be temporarily waived; and as soon as they can read, they study the
"Army Regulations," to make sure that they concede no more. Neither as
citizens nor as soldiers do they retain the faculty of dumb, dead
submission which sustains them through every conceivable wrong while
enslaved. Before a blow from his master the slave helplessly cowers, and
takes refuge in silent and inert despair. He draws his head into his
shell, like a turtle, and simply endures. Liberate him, he quits the
shell forever, and the naked palpitating tissue is left bare.
Afterwards, every touch reaches a