mously increased without gain to the State, the courts became a farce, county-records became hopelessly confused, and the experiment of unintelligent negro-suffrage broke down before the onset of an intelligent white minority, who, with much excuse for their conduct and much that was atrocious in their methods, thrust the negro out of his political ascendancy and took the reins of government into their own hands. Then there were not wanting those who would gladly put the negro back into the nearest possible approach to his condition before the war. There arose a system of contracts that in some dark way left the proceeds of the year in the hands of the planter. There was the omnivorous and remorseless store-keeper with his exorbitant prices and his still more exorbitant interest, so that the negro was almost always in debt. Finally the freedman fell back on one part of his freedom that was still left. He could take to his heels, as he could not in the days before the war. Such migrations have been going on ever since the war, the movement being chiefly from one southern State to another, especially to Texas. Later the tide turned northward, and Kansas is now the Land of Beulah to the sable pilgrim thus pulling himself loose from the Slough of Despond and breaking out from the dungeons of Giant Despair.

He has not found the plains of Kansas equal to the Delectable Hills of the Puritan dreamer, nor does he think Indiana the Canaan of his hopes. But his pilgrimage has not been wholly lost, for it is likely to happen that the people, of the South, if only for the sake of keeping him at home, will from time to time do something to fill up the slough with gravel and adorn the dungeons with carpets and pianos,- not the carpets and pianos that the negro legislator carried home from the scene of his legislation, but such as he now can earn. In other words, the negro has no mind to be again, legally or virtually, a slave. In his blind way but with increasing intelligence he will try all shifts to make his freedom secure him the objects of his especial desires. He cannot do much with his vote as yet and he knows it by bitter experience, but by and by the whites will divide into parties, each side will court his vote and then his time will have come. He has tried the liberty of locomotion and has scared his white neighbors into a

more respectful tone; indeed, a convention of planters at Vicksburg last year was found ready to promise him almost anything if he would not go away.

Back of all this lies an exceeding sensitiveness of the American people to the question of personal rights. If they really think that the results of the war in the liberation of the slaves are in peril, they will throw out of the way any politician or any party that shall seem to them implicated in the sin. The history of the late extra session of Congress, and its effect upon the prospects of the two great parties and their various leaders, furnish striking illustrations of this truth. The American people will not let the work of the war be undone.

So then we say that slavery is killed in the superlative degree. It is "killed dead." There is still a good deal of strong pounding in its tail, as there is still much wriggling in the snake whose head is cut off, but we know that the head is off from slavery, however much our party-leaders may shout the rallying-cry and point with quivering finger at its powerful contortions in the dust. It may die as hard as the dragon in the Faery Queen, but die it will. In spite of all our errors of statesmanship it has lost strength faster than we had any right to hope.

And once more why? Because it has no hold upon the wills of those whom it once oppressed. They have intense repugnance to their old condition; they are armed with the ballot and can soon learn to use it wisely; they have access to schools; they are apt pupils in all things; their labor is too valuable to be driven away by the semblance of reënslavement; they are acquiring property and can use it to defend themselves. The African went on multiplying in slavery, while every other race on which the experiment was tried died like the Indian or broke through to freedom like the Hebrew, or absorbed its conquerors like the Anglo-Saxon. But now the negro has no mind to go back under the yoke. His old meekness and contentment have given place to a hunger for liberty which will never be satisfied with anything less than liberty itself. He has shown enough manliness to break down much of the old social restriction that once held him back. win him servants if not friends.

His money

will

But how is it with the other kind of slave? We find him of a wholly different mind. His bondage is an enslavement in the very sources out of which motives are presented to the will. He is often willing to confess, with shame or without shame, that his slavery has become to him, as the prison-walls to Bonnivard, dearer than the sunlight of the outer world. He does not wholly want to be free. Confessing his degradation, his loss, his blighted future, wishing that some surgical operation could be performed upon him by which his appetite could be removed without his knowledge or help, he yet resists the breaking of his bondage; if once freed, he often rushes back to put on again his chains. A symbol of his treatment of those who would free him may be found in a bit of history from the battle of Big Bethel near the beginning of the war of the Rebellion when Theodore Winthrop, burning with desire to free and help the slave, led a charge upon the enemy's works, it was a slave that seized a musket, leaped upon the rampart and shot Winthrop through the heart.

Just here comes in the peculiar and radical difficulty of the temperance-war. It lies in the moral state of the drinker. Hence we see the great mischief of this bondage and the exceeding sinfulness of this sin,-in that it reaches so deeply among the motives that stir the will, subjugating the animal nature, making the prisoner hug his chains, driving him to strike wildly at the oppressor who would "interfere with his liberty" by setting him free.

It is exactly this that makes the difficulty of enforcing a prohibitory or even a repressive law. "The boys" take delight in evading or defying the law. They form "clubs" and buy a stock of liquors. They steal in at the back-doors of liquor-shops, especially on Sunday, escorted, very likely, by those whose business it is to see that no such back-doors are open. The excitement of a "crusade" and the sense of being attacked get them together to discuss the state of affairs and to keep up their courage with drink. All reformatory agitations of the public mind tend thus to be the "savor of death unto death," or "of life unto life." Those who are not yet under the dominion of appetite enjoy the excitement of running the risk of it, as a child likes to play with fire: with this mood the

motives of fear are not likely to have much weight. Those who are well subjected to the appetite are as far as possible from the mind of those negroes who met the advancing columns of the Union army, piling their bureaus and their feather-beds upon mule-carts and starting out in faith and joy toward the polar star.

With this state of mind in the immediate victim corresponds the state of mind in the mass of the community. That sensitiveness to questions of personal rights, of which we have spoken as helping to make the death of slavery sure, here works the other way. The balance of power in most American towns is held by people of shallow thinking, who say that "if a man is fool enough to spoil himself with drink, he has a right to." They do not think any further than this. The involuntary victims, the wife, the children, the neighbors, the insurance companies paying for fires kindled by the drunkard in his debauch, the inoffensive persons subjected to risks of assault, the tax-payers maintaining jails and alms-houses and asylums of all kinds to receive the victims as they fall,-these are scantily remembered; their wrongs and harms are nothing to the greater wrong of preventing the most miserable drunkard from getting his drink if he chooses to ruin himself thereby. The public conscience is up to the standard of exacting a heavy license-fee from the seller, but even that moral act *savors strongly of the thrift that tries to keep down the taxes. A few States have got far enough to give a person injured by a drunken man a claim to civil damages from the seller, but it is doubtful whether any of them will keep up to that pitch of virtue, especially if the dealers endeavor to procure a repeal of the law.

We have hinted at the temptation to eke out the public revenues by license-fees; the average man will far more cheerfully lose ten dollars without exactly knowing how, than pay one dollar in cash into the tax-collector's hand. This influence is very powerful where the license-fees become the property of the town or city, not being sent up to the county or the State. There are no revenues to be got by licensing a little slaveholding here and there.

We have also to reckon with the fact that multitudes of

people crave the exhiliration of alcohol, even though it be only temporary and followed by corresponding depression and pain.

"Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,

O'er a' the ills o' life victorious."

Thomas Hardy, in "Far from the Madding Crowd," has graphically sketched the pleasure of a company of rustics in the promised opportunity of drinking themselves stupid in the barn and sleeping themselves sober again wherever they happened to fall on the floor. These were rustics, but the willingness to buy a little animal exhilaration at the cost of the higher self, is one of those many touches of human nature that "make the whole world kin." Men will scheme with cunning or fight with ferocity for the chance to get drunk. But no one wants the exhilaration of being a slave for a little while.

Here, also, we must take account of the charm of conviviality which has appealed to many noble minds from Horace down, and wins many who have no craving for intoxication itself. A Liverpool paper has lately commented upon the manifestations of sympathy by the audiences in the English theaters, whenever the play brings out any strong allusion to the pleasures of drinking or the misery that the habit entails. They were profoundly stirred by each. He who does not realize how steadily contradictory is man in a thousand such things has not gone far in his preparation for dealing with men. Conviviality has wonderful charms for some of us, though it may lead to ruin. But slavery is not made agreeable by the company of friends.

We name further the great multitude of people who are pecuniarily interested in the sale of intoxicating drink. They will move heaven and earth to keep their market open, striking blows without pity or buying votes without shame, flattering or threatening on every side. They work together, the manufacturers and the retailers, by massing their capital to bear down resistance; they work severally in a guerilla warfare which personal interest fills with energy, persistence and cunning. The motive and the prospects of the struggle are shown concisely in the outburst of the Connecticut dealer when brought up for trial: "Judge, there's no use of your trying to