mprovement of the negro must
be attempted, because their race, "suffering the greatest wrong ever
inflicted on any people," would "yet be far removed from being on an
equality with the white race" when they ceased to be slaves; a
"physical difference broader than exists between almost any other two
races" and constituting "a greater disadvantage to us both," would
always set a "ban" upon the negroes even where they were best treated
in America. This unpalatable fact he put before them with that total
absence of pretence which was probably the only possible form of tact
in such a discussion, with no affectation of a hope that progress would
remove it or of a desire that the ordinary white man should lose the
instinct that kept him apart from the black. But this only makes more
apparent his simple recognition of an equality and fellowship which did
exist between him and his hearers in a larger matter than that of
social intercourse or political combination. His appeal to their
capacity for taking large and unselfish views was as direct and as
confident as in his addresses to his own people; it was made in the
language of a man to whom the public spirit which might exist among
black people was of the same quality as that which existed among white,
in whose belief he and his hearers could equally find happiness in
"being worthy of themselves" and in realising the "claim of kindred to
the great God who made them."

It may be well here, without waiting to trace further the course of the
war, in which at the point where we left it the slow but irresistible
progress of conquest was about to set in, to recount briefly the later
stages of the abolition of slavery in America. In 1863 it became
apparent that popular feeling in Missouri and in Maryland was getting
ripe for abolition. Bills were introduced into Congress to compensate
their States if they did away with slavery; the compensation was to be
larger if the abolition was immediate and not gradual. There was a
majority in each House for these Bills, but the Democratic minority was
able to kill them in the House of Representatives by the methods of
"filibustering," or, as we call it, obstruction, to which the procedure
of that body seems well adapted. The Republican majority had not been
very zealous for the Bills; its members asked "why compensate for a
wrong" which they had begun to feel would soon be abolished without
compensation; but their leaders at least did the