would not have sexual intercourse in such a wholesale manner with beasts?

THESE LAWS FORBIDDING INTERMARRIAGE OF THE RACES AND THE INJUSTICES RESULTING THEREFROM ARE CRIMES WHICH ARE CALLING ALOUD TO ALMIGHTY GOD FOR VENGEANCE, AND WE ARE COMPELLED TO SUFFER AS A NATION UNTIL SUCH WRONGS ARE RIGHTED.

I do not think we ought longer to compromise on this grave question, but ought to begin a crusade against it and continue until the laws are changed and men and women allowed to marry whomsoever they please.

None but Almighty God and the women of the Negro race know the baneful effects which colored women have to suffer by such prohibitory laws. Speaking with a colored woman not long ago she said there is nothing so grinding, so crushing as to look into the face of a white woman and have her say by a sarcastic and withering look, "You are nothing but a 'thing' to be used by our men-the laws are against you and all because of your color and race."

I say again that prohibitory marriage laws, such as I have mentioned above, are a sad blot on the escutcheon of our land.

New York City.

A. WALTERS.

moral, mental and physical existence, or from which the tendency in motion is down toward lethargy and degradation, by the relaxing of those forces which lead in the opposite direction.

The previous social and moral condition of the Negro woman, her complete subjugation to the brute nature or animal passions of men of all stations in the society of both races, is too well known by students of social ethics to demand any lengthy discussion here. Yet, as these facts pre

sent fundamental relations to the subject of this contribution, it is really necessary to at least pay a passing notice to the principles here involved.

Slavery, the most bitter and destructive institution of any government, the most satanic and degrading influence with which human society has had to do, formed and flourished in this country from 1619 until the boys of blue and gray met upon the field of mortal combat and drenched the land in human blood.

The colored woman pulling through the night of slavery with hands chained to the plow, with mind chained to darkness and morals chained to the wicked lusts of the South's frightful horde of demoralized white and black men, found herself on the morn of freedom,

"A storm-beaten ark wildly hurled,

O'er the whirlpool of time

With the wrecks of a world."

If in all this land there is a woman deserving the very highest commendation of the world, it is the colored woman. She has had the most discouraging obstacles of any woman in history placed so continuously in her pathway, until in the words of Edgar Allan Poe she cried

"Like that unhappy master,

Whom unmerciful disaster

Follows fast and follows faster."

She is climbing with unfaltering steps the rugged path that leads to the sun-kissed mountain peak of liberty and glory, looking hopefully to the right and left for just one ray of the light, of righteousness, of justice, and encouragement; 'knowing that life is a series of successive heights

to be climbed, the vantage of one reached bringing to view another height and a continued stepping stone to its attainment.

The colored woman, as she is, when compared with her white sister who has thrown around her all the protection that bravery, courage, and heroism have been able to produce, and all the wealth, culture and refinement of ages at her feet-represents a shipwrecked mariner drifting around on the waves of social darkness, out on the sea of national criticism, bravely pressing on toward the harbor of peace and higher moral and intellectual culture.

She stands today tempted and tried as was Christ on the Mount, unaided, unprotected by the laws of the land, working out her own salvation, and the salvation of her people whose future connection with the highest attainments of human genius is as certain as it is that the majestic Mississippi will flow to the gulf until

"The
sun himself grows dim with age,
And Nature sinks in years."

She is the only woman today, in all this broad land, of whom it is not supposed, by a certain class of lawmakers and officers of the law of many of our states, that virtue and purity is prayed for and desired by her, as the mother of a great race of future American citizens.

The question arises, therefore, after forty-five years of American semi-freedom-What is the present status of the Negro woman?

I wish to say emphatically that the colored woman is beyond all reasonable doubts a fixity in the social economy of the nation; that in religion, education and moral reformation she is contributing daily to the progress of the greatest age in the history of man. The home, which is the foundation of good government, is advancing from the one room cabin to the comfortable cottage, modern and sanitary in all its appointments. The parlor contains the most modern musical instruments, books on music, art, literature and science. The dining room and bed chamber are neat and attractive, suggestive of the most improved sense; and the whole home shows a work of improvement and progress along all lines. The art of music and painting, fancy-work and drapery have claimed such a large part of the Negro maidens' education, until we now have a refined, sensitive, neat-appearing woman-indeed, a new woman with a