with these dead and departed cruelties?" Alas, my
friends, these are not dead things. Remember that

"The evil that men do lives after them."

The evil of gross and monstrous abominations, the evil of great organic
institutions crop out long after the departure of the institutions
themselves. If you go to Europe you will find not only the roots, but
likewise many of the deadly fruits of the old Feudal system still
surviving in several of its old states and kingdoms. So, too, with
slavery. The eighteen years of freedom have not obliterated all its
deadly marks from either the souls or bodies of the black woman. The
conditions of life, indeed, have been modified since emancipation; but
it still maintains that the black woman is the Pariah woman of this
land! We have, indeed, degraded women, immigrants, from foreign lands.
In their own countries some of them were so low in the social scale that
they were yoked with the cattle to plow the fields. They were rude,
unlettered, coarse, and benighted. But when they reach _this_ land there
comes an end to their degraded condition.

"They touch our country and their shackles fall."

As soon as they become grafted into the stock of American life they
partake at once of all its large gifts and its noble resources.

Not so with the black woman of the South. Freed, legally she has been;
but the act of emancipation had no talismanic influence to reach to and
alter and transform her degrading social life.

When that proclamation was issued she might have heard the whispered
words in her every hut, "Open, Sesame;" but, so far as her humble
domicile and her degraded person were concerned, there was no invisible
but gracious Genii who, on the instant, could transmute the rudeness of
her hut into instant elegance, and change the crude surroundings of her
home into neatness, taste, and beauty.

The truth is, "Emancipation Day" found her a prostrate and degraded
being; and, although it has brought numerous advantages to her sons, it
has produced but the simplest changes in her social and domestic
condition. She is still the crude, rude, ignorant mother. Remote from
cities, the dweller still in the old plantation hut, neighboring to the
sulky, disaffected master class, who still think her freedom was a
personal robbery of themselves, none of the "fair humanities" have
visited her humble home. The light of knowledge has not fallen upon her
eyes. The fine domesticities which give