probably have been added that, when the novel and hazardous experiment should be fairly in progress, its conduct should be left indubitably to those most concerned in its success, without interference from any outside source that would be likely to develop latent antagonism, or introduce any element of discord, or dislike or distrust, where perfect harmony of feeling and purpose was so plainly essential to be preserved and fostered.

How have these simple and obvious prerequisites to the success of such an experiment been observed in the instance before us?

The reader, may answer this question in detail for himself. The general answer is that every condition of success that has been suggested, or that can be suggested, perhaps, has been carefully violated or disregarded in the conduct of the great American experiment on this line during the last quarter century. Starting out with the two races, the Caucasian and the African, which differ most widely from each other in every respect in which two races can differ-as the subjects of the venture, we have spared no pains to complicate it and render it more difficult and more hopeless at every step, and have indeed the full satisfaction, at the last, of knowing that we have left no blunder untried, nor missed any important error that ignorance could suggest or ingenuity invent, to insure its failure.

We have only to reflect, besides, that this par

ticularly unpromising undertaking was not only not entered upon voluntarily by at least one of the peoples directly concerned in it—and that by far the more numerous and more powerful of the two, and upon whom, therefore, the success of the scheme was mainly or wholly dependentbut was forced upon them by their conquerors in a protracted and bloody war, as a penalty of the war, and for the avowed purpose of establishing their political subjugation to the allied forces of their recent enemies and recent slaves:—we have only to reflect on these things, surely, to discharge our minds of any lingering element of surprise that the first great experiment of racial fusion has not wholly met the expectations of its promoters, and to remove the last lingering element of uncertainty as to the final result.

Nor is there room for surprise that the struggle has involved loss of life, to whatever extent and under whatever pretext. The only matter for wonder is that the land has not been drenched with blood; and blood would have flowed in rivers instead of rills, we may be sure, but for the general inequality of the two parties to the contest, and, especially, the radical weakness of the Negro, which has impelled him to yield place and power everywhere, and always, with a readiness that has preserved his race from destruction, indeed, but at the same time has demonstrated his peculiar unfitness to be made the subject of the experiment that was forced upon him also,

willing or unwilling. It is not pleasant to contemplate, even in imagination, what would have been the probable condition of affairs in the South during the Reconstruction period, had the negroes there largely outnumbered the whites; or if they had possessed more of the aggressive spirit of their white neighbors. It is bad enough as it is; but perhaps it is better as it is, after all-for the black people and the white people of the South, and for the whole people of America, both now and hereafter-that the gentle and patient Ethiopian changes his natural character no more readily than his natural skin under the operation of statute laws.

We may abandon the speculative point of view, however, without ceremony. There is no need to conjure up imaginary troubles. Our actual present and probable, or certain, future ills are quite enough to engage our whole attention. The question before us is, at last, a question as to the plain facts of the condition and position of the Negro among his white neighbors, of their relations and disposition toward each other, and their probable conduct hereafter. The experiment of which the Negro has been the principal subject, and the object of which-to express the purpose in conveniently comprehensive termswas to make him the "equal" of other men inhabiting the same soil with him, has been in force for more than a score of years. What is the net result? What has been accomplished for the

Negro, in that period? Let us determine if we can, and set down as truly as we can within so narrow limits, the bare facts of his case as they are presented to us to-day.

V.

THE NEGRO'S CONDITION AND POSITION.

Is it not a bare, hard fact, then, that the Negro in America has made very little progress, since his emancipation, towards the shining goal set for him by his liberators-the goal of American citizenship, in the true and full sense of the term; the sense in which it is applied to the white man? The desire and endeavor of his friends was to absorb him into the body politic; to assimilate him wholly; to cancel and obliterate every distinction and difference that was in his way, except those imposed on him by nature,—and to ignore these.

It was hoped and expected that he would develop to our standard so surely and so rapidly under this generous treatment, that our prejudices, born and nurtured of former relations only, perhaps, would disappear, and that he would become as one of us; and so vindicate the heroic measures adopted in his behalf. The struggle of the Reconstruction period was to clear his way to higher ground, and but for the hope and expectation that he could reach it and would reach it, almost at a bound, the efforts of the Republican party, of his friends everywhere, to push him