ARTICLE VIII.—THE ANALOGY OF SLAVERY AND INTEMPERANCE BEFORE THE LAW.

IT is sometimes said: "Slavery was destroyed by law; why cannot intemperance be treated in the same radical way?" A constitutional amendment brought the former to a final end; let us take courage from our victory to make another amendment to destroy the traffic in intoxicating drink. Then make one more amendment to destroy polygamy, and we shall have disposed of the triple "relics of barbarism." Then shall the blessings of freedom, total abstinence, and monogamy go handin-hand through the south, the north, and the distant west. Thus argue many good people, and they are coming up to some of our western legislatures with petitions numerously signed asking that even all manufacture of intoxicating drink be forbidden, and that not merely by a law but by constitutional enactment. When told that the matter is too great to be thus managed, they fall back on the analogy of slavery. Slavery was great and ruled the nation; now it is dead beyond resurrection, for a constitutional amendment has been laid like a great rock over the door of its tomb; let us treat intemperance in the same thorough way. So, like Macbeth after the salutation of the witches, we stand possessed of the first part of the prophecy and wonder how we are to come by the rest. We find thus suggested to us the inquiry, what parallel is there in the position of slavery and intemperance before the law?

There is this first to be said that both slavery and intemperance are things that come within the view of the law. Belief is free and a man may believe what he pleases on any subject, but these matters belong not only to belief but to relations and conduct, and so must come within the province of legislation. Personal habits and conduct are largely free but often transgress the boundaries of right and of statute. Slavery is a method of social relationship and can be dealt with as accurately as polygamy or partnership in business; intemperance involves manufacturing, imports and exports, sales and pur

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chases, and serves to produce a man, woman or child with inflamed passions from which the curb of the judgment has been partly or wholly thrown off, so that he will far more easily than before become a pauper, an idiot, or a criminal and drag others after him to the same or a like unhappy fate.

This suggests a further fact: both slavery and intemperance are recognized as mischievous so as to be the objects of repressive legislation. Long before the United States did anything to uproot slavery within its own boundaries, it prohibited the importation of slaves and joined in efforts to destroy the slavetrade upon the high seas. Our national virtue never rose to the height of doing more until it became a military necessity, but amid all the refusal there was a half-way confession that it would be a good thing if we could. At last the necessity came, the blow was struck in the Emancipation Proclamation, it was clinched by constitutional amendment, and slavery as a legalized method of holding men as chattels came to an end. Intemperance stands before public-sentiment and the law-maker in a light essentially the same. The facts of its mischievousness are well known and freely confessed. The national government lays heavy taxes upon the drinking-habit as one that needs repression,-but, unhappily, also as one that is sure to go on, however heavily it may be taxed. The several state governments aim at it legislation which is more or less repressive up to the point of forbidding all use except that for medicinal and mechanical purposes. License fees are demanded by the State not only for revenue but that the State may have some return for the mischief of the traffic and some means of repairing at least a part of the damage. Again and again have questions connected with the legal prohibition or repression of drinking been taken before the courts, but they have always been decided in favor of the authority of the State to tax, regulate, hedge up or prohibit at its pleasure. If a constitutional amendment can be framed that will kill intemperance as thoroughly as slavery is killed by that means, the State or nation is perfectly at liberty to take that step and the judgment of the observant throughout the world would be like that which answered Lincoln's emancipation-proclamation, and given with a great shout of "well done."

Yet here we find a great multitude of people hanging back. They have the right on their side, a great need that something be done, and a plausible analogy to encourage them to push on; yet they have no heart to press for that constitutional prohibition that shall cut up the Upas-tree root and branch. Why is this so? It is because there are differences as well as resemblances between slavery and intemperance before the law, and those differences are of the kind that help slavery to stay killed but would help intemperance to come back to life. For there are differences in being killed. A man once told the writer about a pair of horses that were struck by the locomotive: "One of them was killed dead and the other was killed so that they had to kill him." Slavery was killed dead and twice dead at the close of the war: these reluctant people evidently fear that the new amendment would kill intemperance only so far that we should have to go on killing it again and again.

The radical difference between slavery and intemperance is that the victim of the former is involuntary, forced, while the most conspicuous victim of the latter keeps up at least the semblance and goes through the motions of being voluntary in his subjection and loss. These facts are too plain to need proving. The negro was brought from Africa or bred upon the plantation, and he never heard inquiry as to his likes or dislikes. He was sold and bought, worked and whipped, sent hither and thither, with no voice in the matter at all. From the border States he sometimes slipped away to a land of freedom, but this was not the rule. How long moral or economic considerations would have been in working out his freedom, is of course uncertain, but it might easily have been a hundred years more. When at last "strictly as a military necessity" he was given his freedom, he was armed also with the ballot; between the two he must mainly shift for himself.

How he has done it thus far, we all know. Densely ignorant, he gave his political action into the charge of rogues who bore the right party-name and who made large promises if the solid negro-vote would only give them power. The rogues, white and black, furnished the, South with the kind of government that might have been expected: State-debts were enor

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