tact.
One looks for a gradual process, and beholds a sudden illumination. This
abates a little of one's wrath at slavery, perhaps, though the residuum
is quite sufficient; but it infinitely enhances one's hopes for the race
set free. It shows that they have simply risen to the stature of men,
and must be treated accordingly.

And, indeed, when one thinks how unexampled in our tame experience is
the event which has thus suddenly raised them from their low estate, one
must expect to find something unexampled in the result. This is true
even where liberty has come merely as a thing to be passively received;
but in many cases the personal share of the freedman has been anything
but passive. What can most of us know of the awful thrill which goes
through the soul of a man, when, having come over a hundred miles of
hourly danger out of slavery to our lines, with rifle-bullets whizzing
round him and bloodhounds on the trail behind, he counts that for a
preliminary trip only, and, having thus found the way, goes back through
that hundred miles of peril yet again, and brings away his wife and
child? As Hawthorne's artist flung his hopeless pencil into Niagara, so
all one's puny literary art seems utterly merged and swept away in the
magnificent flood of untaught eloquence with which some such nameless
man will pour out his tale. Two things seem worth recording, and no
third: the passionate emotions of the humblest negro, as they burst into
language at such a time,--and the very highest triumph of the very
greatest dramatic genius, if perchance some Shakespeare or Goethe could
imagine a kindred utterance. Anything intermediate must be worthless and
unavailing.

Now there is no doubt, that, under this great stimulus, the freedmen
will do their part; the anxious question is, whether we of the North are
ready to do ours. Our part consists not chiefly in money and old
clothes, nor even in school-books and teachers. The essential thing
which we need to give them is justice; for that must be the first demand
of every rational being. Give them justice, and they can dispense even
with our love. Give them the most exuberant and zealous love, and it may
only hurt them, if it leads us to subject them to fatal experiments, and
to fancy them exceptions to the universal laws.

Cochin well says,--"To have set men at liberty is not enough: it is
necessary to place them in society." That American emancipation should
be a success is more import