herself. Law and society may
decree; but in our normal humanity there throbs a sentiment which
neutralizes every external impulse contrary to its promptings.

In meditating on the varied history of the Negro in the United States,
since his first landing on the banks of the James River in 1619 till
the Emancipation Act of President Lincoln in 1865, it is curious to
observe that the elevation of the race, though in a great measure
secured, proceeded from circumstances almost the reverse of those that
operated so favourably in the same direction elsewhere. The men of the
slave-holding States, chiefly Puritans or influenced by Puritanic
surroundings, were not under the ecclesiastical sway which rendered
possible in the West Indies and other Catholic countries the
establishment of the reciprocal bonds of god-parents and god-children.
The self-same causes operated to prevent any large blending of the two
races, inasmuch as the immigrant from Britain who [247] had gone forth
from his country to better his fortune had not left behind him his
attachment to the institutions of the mother-land, among which
marrying, whenever practicable, was one of the most cherished. Above
all, too, as another powerful check at first to such alliances between
the ruling and servile races of the States, there existed the native
idiosyncracy of the Anglo-Saxon. That class of them who had left
Britain were likelier than the more refined of their nation to exhibit
in its crudest and cruellest form the innate jealousy and contempt of
other races that pervades the Anglo-Saxon bosom. It is but a simple
fact that, whenever he condescended thereto, familiarity with even the
loveliest of the subject people was regarded as a mighty self-unbending
for which the object should be correspondingly grateful. So there
could, in the beginning, be no frequent instances of the romantic
chivalry that gilded the quasi-marital relations of the more fervid and
humane members of the Latin stock.

But this kind of intercourse, which in the earlier generation was
undoubtedly restricted in North America by the checks above adverted
to, and, presumably, also by the mutual unintelligibility [248] in
speech, gradually expanded with the natural increase of the slave
population. The American-born, English-speaking Negro girl, who had in
many cases been the playmate of her owner, was naturally more
intelligible, more accessible, more attractive--and the inevitable
conseque