rowded cities like New York, Baltimore and Savannah, where the
so-called pressure of population upon subsistence has produced a
hand-to-hand fight for existence by the wage-workers in every avenue
of industry.

This is no fancy picture. It is a plain, logical deduction of what
would result from the restoration to the people of that equal chance
in the race of life which every man has a right to expect, to demand,
and to exact as a condition of his membership of organized society.

The wag who started the "forty acres and a mule" idea among the black
people of the South was a wise fool; wise in that he enunciated a
principle which every argument of sound policy should have dictated,
_upon the condition that the forty acres could in no wise be
alienated_, and that it could be regarded _only_ as _property_ as
_long as it was cultivated_; and a fool because he designed simply to
impose upon the credulity and ignorance of his victims. But the
justness of the "forty acre" donation cannot be controverted. In the
first place, the slave had earned this miserable stipend from the
government by two hundred years of unrequited toil; and, secondly, as
a free man, he was inherently entitled to so much of the soil of his
country as would suffice to maintain him in the freedom thrust upon
him. To tell him he was a free man, and at the same time shut him off
from free access to the soil upon which he had been reared, without a
penny in his pocket, and with an army of children at his
coat-tail--some of his reputed wife's children being the illegitimate
offspring of a former inhuman master--was to add insult to injury, to
mix syrup and hyssop, to aggravate into curses the pretended
conferrence of blessings.

When I think of the absolutely destitute condition of the colored
people of the South at the close of the Rebellion; when I remember the
moral and intellectual enervation which slavery had produced in them;
when I remember that not only were they thus bankrupt, but that they
were absolutely and unconditionally cut off from the soil, with
absolutely no right or title in it, I am surprised,--not that they
have already got a respectable slice of landed interests; not that
they have taken hold eagerly of the advantages of moral and
intellectual opportunities of development placed in their reach by the
charitable philanthropy of good men and women; not that they have
bought homes and supplied them with articles of convenience and
comfo