e prosperity complete, when wealth was amassed by
doubtful means. Instead of being a pleasure and honourable, labour was
looked upon as something which had degradation associated with it. The
planters and their families held aloof from it because it was the badge
of slavery. The slaves themselves disliked it because it belonged to
their condition of bondage.

As it has been shown, slavery reached its darkest phase in the years
which immediately preceded the era of emancipation, during Booker
Washington's childhood. Many telling illustrations might be given to
show that this was actually the fact. I am personally well acquainted
with an ex-slave, who is also a native of Virginia, who vividly
remembers those days. At the time of his birth his mother was hardly
more than sixteen years of age; but, notwithstanding, this girl had
already tasted enough of the anguish and bitterness of slavery which
might more than have sufficed for a long lifetime. She was so roughly
treated by her owner that for some little time preceding her child's
birth she remained concealed in a neighbouring wood, where the only diet
procurable was berries or wild fruit. In this case the painful anomaly
was that the slave-girl's husband was a free man who, loving his wife
and child, made strenuous efforts to purchase them, but did so quite
unsuccessfully. The master even moved away to another place, where the
mother did the work of a domestic servant, and during this time her son
experienced something of the gaiety of childhood while playing in the
yard with coloured juveniles of his own age, who, like himself, were as
young cattle in a pen growing up for a sad destiny.

In those days, as Booker Washington himself would be aware,
slave-mothers would at times speak to their children of Georgia, or
going "down South," in order to inspire terror. Going to Georgia meant
to pass on into a land without hope, of darkness and death. Occasionally
a hard-featured stranger would appear on the scene, and, while leaning
on the fence with folded arms, he would watch the boys at play in the
yard with the interested glances of a trader. Then, as must have
appeared mysteriously to the boys themselves, after the stranger had
gone away, one or another of the boys would be missing. Then it would be
whispered, as though some horror had overtaken them, the missing boy had
been taken "down South"--into Georgia.

Booker Washington is certainly one of the most extraordinary e