e and fall.

The writer takes it that the young "Negro" and his father are to
represent only the ante-bellum and the post-bellum Negro. To go beyond
that, to take him in his earlier state in the native wilds of his
fatherland, before the Anglo-Saxon missionary reached him and gave to
the world a true picture of his morality, would be to present to the
world some startling facts that would not only put to shame the "young
Negro," but also the hosts of men of all nations who glory in the
progress they have made in morals.

It can be proven by the best authorities that many of the heathen
Africans, though crude in ethics, were pure morally.

But the discussion resolves itself into two very important questions.
What was the moral condition of the Negro before the war, and what is
his moral condition to-day? Before the war, what a picture comes
before us at these words, what a panorama of deeds passes before our
mind's eye. Years of gross darkness, darkness that deepens into the
blackness of the pit, those days that seem like a hideous nightmare to
the hoary headed, and the story of which sounds to the youth like a
heart-rending and nauseating recital. Yet, it was not all dark, some
would say; perhaps not, but the bright spots only tended to intensify
the darkness.

What morals were chattels expected to have, and who gave to these
chattels their moral code? It was certainly not of their own making.
What could be the moral condition of a race to whom family rights were
forbidden and whose business, next to labor, was to propagate solely
for the master's gain? The words mother, father, were used only in the
language of the "big house."

Womanhood, the foundation stone of moral eminence, passed through a
crucial ordeal, and it is to be greatly wondered at that the Negro
woman emerged with even the crudest type of moral capacity.

Every line on every page of the history of those dark days teem and
reek with the abandon of licentiousness, nor could this be otherwise.
It was the natural sequence of a debasing system. It is no
disparagement upon the noble few whose garments were kept unspotted,
nor upon those who would have reached towards higher ideals, if they
had been masters of themselves, to say that the ante-bellum Negro did
not possess a great degree of morality. There can be no other
conclusion drawn from such demoralizing conditions.

The moral status of the Negro is to-day an all-absorbing theme, and is
discussed