ained, and if
excessive concessions do not succeed in undoing all that has been done,
a new era, at once purer and greater than that which has just ended.

Let others accuse me of optimism; I willingly agree to it. I believe
that optimism is often right here below. We need hope; we need sometimes
to receive good news; we need to see sometimes the bright side of
things. The bright side is often the true side; if Love is blindfolded,
I see a triple bandage on the eyes of Hate. Kindliness has its
privileges; and I do not think myself in a worse position than another
to judge the United States because they inspire me with an earnest
sympathy; because, after having mourned their faults and trembled at
their perils, I have joyfully saluted the noble and manly policy of
which the election of Mr. Lincoln is the symptom. Is it not true, that
at the first news we all seemed to breathe a whiff of pure and free air
from the other side of the ocean?

It is a pleasure, in times like ours, to feel that certain principles
still live; that they will be obeyed, cost what it may; that questions
of conscience can yet sometimes weigh down questions of profit. The
abolition of slavery will be, I have always thought, the principal
conquest of the nineteenth century. This will be its recommendation in
the eyes of posterity, and the chief compensation for many of its
weaknesses. As for us old soldiers of emancipation, who have not ceased
to combat for it for twenty years and more, at the tribunal and
elsewhere, we shall be excused without doubt for seeing in the triumph
of our American friends something else than a subject of lamentation.

CHAPTER I.

AMERICAN SLAVERY.

If they had not triumphed, do you know who would have gained the
victory? Slavery is only a word--a vile word, doubtless, but to which we
in time become habituated. To what do we not become habituated? We have
stores of indulgence and indifference for the social iniquities which
have found their way into the current of cotemporary civilization, and
which can invoke prescription. So we have come to speak of American
slavery with perfect sang froid. We are not, therefore, to stop at the
word, but to go straight to the thing; and the thing is this:

Every day, in all the Southern States, families are sold at retail: the
father to one, the mother to another, the son to a third, the young
daughter to a fourth; and the father, the mother, the children, are
scattered to