e must have a
nurse." He went away in utter disgust, and declared to the people
outside that I had got the miserablest notion he had ever heard,
to spoil a good field hand like his Nancy to nurse her own baby.

We were told the other day by Wendell Phillips, upon the
Anti-Slavery platform, that it takes people forty years to
outgrow an old idea. The slave population of the South is not yet
removed a hundred years from the barbarism of Africa, where women
have no rights, no privileges, but are trampled under foot in all
the savageism of the past. And the slave man has looked on to see
his master will everything as he willed, and he has learned the
lesson from his master. Mr. Higginson told us that the
slave-master never understood the slave. I know that to be the
fact. Neither does man understand woman to-day, because she has
always been held subservient to him. Now it is proposed to give
manhood the suffrage in all these Southern States, and to leave
the poor slave woman bound under the ban of the direst curse of
slavery to him who is the father of her children. It is decreed
upon all the statute books of slavery, that the child shall
follow the condition of the mother. That has been the decree from
the beginning of this awful slave system; that the whitest woman,
the child of a slave mother, whose hair curled down to her waist,
and whose blue eyes of beauty were a lure to the statesmen of the
South, should be a slave, though the Governor of the State were
her father. Are you to leave her there yet, and desecrate
marriage, by making it such a bond of slavery that the woman
shall say, "I do not want to be married, to suffer oppression!"
Are you to force prostitution and wrong upon those people by
these unjust laws? Are you to compel wickedness and crime? Are
you going to let it stand upon the statute books of the Southern
States that the only woman free to work for her own child shall
be the mother of illegitimate children? That is the consequence
of what you are doing to the people who in all time past, since
they have lived upon this continent, have been denied the right
of sacred marriage; and who must have, as Wendell Phillips tells
us, forty years to outgrow the past, or to educate them.

We are told by Mr. Phillips to flood the South wit