place ourselves at their point of view. To judge a slave-owner of the South, you must put yourself in his place.

He had not originated slavery. He had not embarked in the slave-trade. He had made vigorous efforts to keep the traffic out. Virginia was the first civilized country to denounce it; and in twenty-three separate acts her burgesses protested to the crown against it. But the whole world was committed to the system, and Virginia was powerless to stem such a tide. Massachusetts had been

the first colony to give express legislative sanction to slavery; and New England was sincere in her attempts to make negro slaves profitable in her fields, just as she had been to make good slaves out of the Indians. It was not till her failure had become as evident as the success of her Southern neighbors had become exasperatingly complete, that the bowels of the Puritan began to compassionate the unfortunate African-who, in literal fact, was vastly better off in Virginia than he had ever been in heathen, slavery-cursed, man-eating Africa. The Virginian did not reproach himself for the sin and shame of slavery. He had no cause to do so. If he read his ancient histories, he saw the relation of master and slave reaching back to the very dawn of time. If he read his Bible, he followed the master and the slave from the Alpha

to the Omega of the sacred book; and amid its thousands of words upon its hundreds of subjects there was not one in which the inspired writers warned the misguided children of men of the sin and shame of slavery. And if the Virginian had been a prophet he would have looked forward into the twentieth century and seen slavery in some form still existing in every nation of the earth-in spite of Pharisee, Scribe, Sadducee, abolitionist, missionary, Salvation Army, Christian Church, and the universal brotherhood of man.

The clear-eyed student who looks beneath forms to find the substance and reality of things, will be happily constituted, indeed, if his investigation does not compel him to conclude that there is more actual, degrading, heartless, soul-destroying serfdom on this earth now than there was in the year 1860. As far as was possible, the Virginian mitigated the evils of his system. On many estates the life of the slave was far less toilsome, less racked by care and responsibility, than that of the debt-ridden master who owned him. The average negro slave was not only better off than the average free negro, but was more securely safeguarded against want in sickness and old age than was "the poor white." Benevolence was gradually doing its quiet work; and under the influence of such men as Wythe, Washington, Jefferson, Madison,

and John Randolph the numbers of the free negroes were ever on the increase. In 1781, Virginia already had upward of twelve thousand free negroes within her borders-a number which compares favorably with that set free by legislative enactments in New England.

In repealing the Stamp Act Great Britain had made a declaration of her right to pass laws binding the colonies in all cases whatsoever; in 1770 she repealed the duties on glass, paper, and paint, but left the duty on tea. So that at each turn of the contest she yielded enough to encourage opposition and not enough to satisfy it. Nevertheless, the colonies, as a whole, grew quiet. Tumults almost entirely ceased. New York repealed her nonimportation act, and most of the colonies began to buy all sorts of British goods excepting tea. The great boycott was practically at an end. John Adams quit politics and gave his time to law. Sam Adams could find nobody to take an interest in his anti-British talk. Thomas Jefferson made record of the fact that "our countrymen seemed to fall into a state of insensibility to our situation." The students of Princeton put on mourning gowns, and "Lynch, of South Carolina, is said to have shed tears over what he deemed the lost cause."

In February, 1770, while Mr. Jefferson and his mother were at a neighbor's house on a visit, a negro came running to bring the news that the old