the right direction. Just
think of the immense advance of public opinion within four years,
and of the grand successive steps of this advance,--Emancipation in
the District of Columbia, the Repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, the
General Emancipation Act, the Amendment of the Constitution. All
these do not look as if the black were about to be ground to
powder beneath the heel of the white. If the negroes are oppressed
in the South, they can emigrate; no laws hold them; active,
industrious laborers will soon find openings in any part of the
Union."

"No," said Theophilus, "there will be black laws like those of
Illinois and Tennessee; there will be turbulent uprisings of the
Irish, excited by political demagogues, that will bar them out of
Northern States. Besides, as a class, they _will_ be idle and
worthless. It will not be their fault, but it will be the result of
their slave education. All their past observation of their masters has
taught them that liberty means licensed laziness, that work means
degradation; and therefore they will loathe work, and cherish laziness
as the sign of liberty. 'Am not I free? Have I not as good a right to
do nothing as you?' will be the cry.

"Already the lazy whites, who never lifted a hand in any useful
employment, begin to raise the cry that 'niggers won't work;' and I
suspect the cry may not be without reason. Industrious citizens can
never be made in a community where the higher class think useful labor
a disgrace. The whites will oppose the negro in every effort to rise;
they will debar him of every civil and social right; they will set
him the worst possible example, as they have been doing for hundreds
of years; and then they will hound and hiss at him for being what they
made him. This is the old track of the world,--the good, broad,
reputable road on which all aristocracies and privileged classes have
been always traveling; and it's not likely that we shall have much of
a secession from it. The millennium isn't so near us as that, by a
great deal."

"It's all very well arguing from human selfishness and human sin in
that way," said I; "but you can't take up a newspaper that doesn't
contain abundant facts to the contrary. Here, now,"--and I turned to
the "Tribune,"--"is one item that fell under my eye accidentally, as
you were speaking:--

"'The Superintendent of Freedmen's Affairs in Louisiana, in making up
his last Annual Report, says he has 1,952 blacks settled temporar