that has been noted, but confirms the rule when closely examined.

The line of separation of the people followed the actual boundary of the Slave territory in all its course.

Certainly, more than one motive or principle influenced the people of America in their conflict. But we need not consider what other motives there were. It is idle to deny, it is the blindest self-deception not to see, that Slavery was the real occasion, and the unfortunate Negro the real cause, of all our strife. Slavery has disappeared. The Negro remains. His changed status furnishes us with new occasion for renewed contention. We are still divided. The Negro keeps us apart. His presence is enough, whatever his condition, to maintain the difference and consequent division that his presence caused in the first instance. He has stood between us, as slave, as freedman, as citizen,-and he stands between us still in his present anomalous and most undesirable character, for which it is difficult to find a name.

No matter whose the fault, is not the fact evident that, in whatsoever guise and howsoever regarded, the Negro himself has been and is and promises to remain the one insuperable barrier to the perfect Union which our forefathers sought to form, and which the people of America, of the South and the North alike, still desire above all things to see consummated?

If not, so much the worse for us. For if the Negro was not the cause of our difference and division, then is that cause radical indeed. The old Union was a lie and no Union. The new Union is the old Union restored, with a line of graves to remind us forever of the existence of two antagonistic sections, and to form a lowly but always impassable wall between them.

No, it is better for us that the Negro is surely the cause of our estrangement, and that the cause does not consist in a deep-rooted antipathy, as irreconcilable as inexplicable, between the people of the two groups of States. We might solve the Negro problem in time, though it were involved in tenfold the difficulties it now presents. Woe betide us and our children if our old hatreds were innate, and so strong on both sides, or on either side, that they could find adequate expression only in four years of bloody warfare; and if they are but concealed now under the old cloak of false friendship, or even the new cloak of a false hope, and can never be wholly displaced from our secret hearts!

Every day the truth confronts us, and demands recognition and consideration and action. Strange that we should have ignored it or evaded it so long. It had been far better for us-the people of the North and of the South alike—if we had recognized it and accepted it and acted on it, long ago. We shall be wise when we deal with it, and with each other, openly, frankly and

honestly. We shall but multiply our difficulties and our differences, we may be assured, and shall remain apart, while professing to stand together, so long as we refuse to see what is between us; to declare what we see and know; and to undertake the work that knowledge and experience teach us must be undertaken, if we are ever to make the Union a union in more than name.

III.

THE CONTINUING CAUSE.

THE purpose being to present the facts of our condition as plainly as practicable, and to deal with them honestly, we cannot make too sure of our ground, nor pass over any reasonable criticism that can be anticipated.

If we could proceed upon the assumption that it will be conceded that the Negro has been, and is, the cause of all our contention and strife, the rest of our task would be quickly disposed of. The cause of trouble being granted, it would remain only to consider how it could be remedied or removed. But we cannot assume so much, or

so little.

Some there are, doubtless, and not a few honest men among them, who will be ready enough to concede that the Negro was such a cause before the war and during the Reconstruction period, but will deny that he is a cause of difference now, or that there is, indeed, any longer a serious cause of difference between the sections. It is not infrequently asserted that there is, at last, no North, no South, and "no longer a negro question"; or, at any rate, that there would be none if the politicians of the North would let the South

alone, and, on the other hand, if the South would let the Negro alone:—all of which assertions and qualifications balance each other quite satisfactorily, for our purpose, and certainly render it unnecessary to go into an extended argument to show that the Negro is well up to the front among the issues of our day. The South has not yet wholly dematerialized as a political entity, and the negro question remains quite prominent enough there to make us reasonably sure that the South will not let the Negro alone, or the politicians let the South alone, in our time, if ever. The plea for the preservation of the Union did not suffice to keep down the negro question before the South seceded, and when the Negro himself was silent perforce. The cry of a restored Union will not suffice to keep that question in the background, now that secession has failed of its purpose, and the voice of the Negro himself is raised in appeal for the enjoyment of the rights to which he is entitled by virtue of his changed condition from slave to citizen, and of our solemn engagement with him.

Nay, we cannot so easily forget him. Let those good people, North and South, who flatter themselves that the negro question has been forever displaced, or even so much as temporarily obscured, by another issue-the issue of a Protective Tariff which, as they say, divides the country on new and shifting and non-sectional lines-but consider for a moment.