he
had never learned the difference between _meum_ and _tuum_, and the
silver lining to this cloud of ignorance lay in the fact that he was
thereby enabled more speedily to increase his store of worldly goods,
thus leaving time for greater devotion to the particular of mental
development.

But take the minority of instances, where every advantage has been given
him; where, freed from the relations of master and slave, he has been
thrown with whites and the spirit of emulation naturally excited; where
his parents have made every sacrifice necessary to procure him tutors
(numbers of them had private teachers, and very competent ones too, just
after the war) and books and all the paraphernalia of learning, and even
the best social position possible to him in the section where he
happened to be, themselves retreating into the background with the
pathetic humility and self-abnegation of parents who believe and desire
their offspring to be of a higher order than themselves,--does the
highest culture of which he seems capable make him more than the peer of
the mediocre white? I and hundreds of others have read with pleasure the
speech of Rev. William D. Johnson, A.M., colored delegate to the
Methodist Episcopal Conference which some months ago met in Georgia. It
was a good speech for a colored man--a capitally, wonderfully good
speech--and I applaud it with cordial pleasure and reciprocation of the
good feeling which pervades it; but is it more than the address of the
average white? As the address of any one of the white members would it
have been reported, or have attracted attention, save for its animus?

There are exceptional cases among the negroes as among the whites; but
because we have a Cuvier, a Webster, a Dupuytren, are we prepared to
assert as a general fact that the brain of the white man weighs
sixty-four ounces? And I speak of the negroes as a class. I refer to the
negro of the South, not to the barbarian of Africa, who really exists,
nor to the negro of the Northern mind, who is only "founded on fact." I
refer to the negro as he is in our day and generation, not as he will or
may be after centuries of revolution in his circumstances which will
produce Heaven knows what changes in his mental, moral and physical
nature. Many believe that these negroes, whom and whose children we have
civilized, having with their freedom received ideas of social equality
and personal ambition which except in isolated cases can ne