breed Governor had a notice placed in every room of his palace-"No one is to mention here the name of cholera;" but I suppose the Venezuelans thought and talked of little else notwithstanding. So, after a like fashion, this negro question was the one thought which pervaded everything throughout the whole of the Secession period. Officially, no doubt, the connexion between slavery and secession was sometimes deniedmore often kept studiously out of sight; but, in society of all kinds, in the press of every shade and colour, from the pulpit of every sect and denomination, you heard of nothing but secession and slavery. You might as soon have ignored the existence of secession as ignored the existence of the slavery question. I am not writing now a work on slavery-I had not the opportunity for doing so had I wished it: I am seeking rather to convey the impressions left upon me by my sojourn in the North during the Southern insurrection. If I succeed in conveying those impressions faithfully, the question of slavery must crop up in these pages at all times and all places, in season and out of season.

Before entering, therefore, on this question, it will be well to say a few words on my own feelings with regard to the "peculiar institution." Morally, I do not look on slavery, nor even on the slave trade, as being a sin apart or different from all other sins. Whether you work men to death in a tailor's slop-shop; whether you burn Arabs alive, as Bugeaud did in Algeria; whether you degrade

men to the level of beasts, as the Bourbons did in Naples; whether you shoot Hindoos from the cannon's mouth, in order to add the prospect of everlasting damnation to the pangs of death, as we did in India; whether you drill human beings into soldier-slaves, like that modern hero-god of Mr. Carlyle's worship; or whether you kidnap negroes, sell them by auction, deny them the rights of men, and scourge them with the lash, like the planters of the South, you are, in my judgment, sinning about equally against the moral law of God. Slavery, however, has one peculiar guilt, which few, if any other, of the hundred modes of human cruelty and oppression can be justly charged with. It is a gigantic, almost an isolated, attempt to reduce oppression to a system, and to establish a social order of which the misery of human beings is to be the fundamental principle. It is for this reason that every honest man, who hates cruelty and loves justice, is bound to lift up his voice against slavery as an accursed thing. It is thus that I think of it, let me say once and for all; and thus, as far as lies within my power, that I mean to write of it.

Let me add also, as I am now, in American parlance, entering my record," that it is a conviction that the existence or the downfal of slavery was inevitably connected with the success or failure of Secession, which created my deep sympathy with the Federal cause. I admit freely, as I shall endeavour to show ere long, that besides slavery there were many great issues

depending on the struggle between North and South. I believe that, putting slavery out of the question, the cause for which the North was fighting was the cause of freedom, of national existence, and of the world's progress. Still, I hold strongly to the American confession of faith," that a people possesses an inalienable "right to choose its own form of government;" and therefore, madly mistaken as I believe the South to have been in separating from the Union, I should yet have hesitated, had it not been for the issue of slavery, as to whether the North was justified in attempting to reconquer the seceding States. If Earl Russell had modified his famous dictum by saying that the North was fighting for empire (and freedom), while the South was fighting for independence (and slavery), he would have uttered a whole truth instead of a sorry half one. Such, at any rate, is my belief; and, having confessed it, the reader will understand better much that I have to say.

Having this keen interest in the whole question of slavery, the position of the Negro in the Free States was a subject which I was anxious to investigate. To an Englishman, it is a new sensation, almost the only new sensation in America, to enter for the first time an hotel where one is surrounded by negro servants. I recollect well the first evening that I dined in the New World. It was at the Everett House in New York, one of the best hotels-let me add, in recollection of my

friend Mr. White of that ilk-in the States. I was seated waiting for my soup, in that calm state of enjoyment which every well-organized human being must feel after a long sea-voyage in sitting at a table which does not rock, when the folding-doors leading from the kitchen to the dining-hall were flung open, and a troop of negro waiters marched in together, two abreast, paced up the rooms in step, bearing the soup tureens aloft, solemnly parted to the right and left, deposited their burdens, and then took each his appointed station, in order to lift up the lids of the tureens at one and the same moment on a given signal. This was my first experience of negrodom. Trivial as the incident may seem, there was in it a love of stage effect, a sort of dramatic talent, which belonged to a far other race than that Anglo-Saxon one of ours. So, throughout my stay in America, I could never look upon a negro face without a strange attraction. The coloured people form so marked a contrast to everything and everybody you see around you. Living, as one does, in a bustling, toiling, sallow, washed-out world of men and women, it is pleasing to the mental as well as to the physical eyesight to turn to the negro folk, with their unwonted complexion, varying from the darkest ebony to the faintest tinge of saffron, with their strange passion for gaudy colours, assorted somehow with a touch of artistic feeling, with their deep, wistful, melancholy eyes, and, above all, with their indescribable air of phy

sical enjoyment in the actual fact of life. If I were an American painter, I would paint nothing but the peculiar people. No doubt this feeling wears away. If gipsies were an institution in England as negroes are in America, if we had a gipsy camp squatted down in every village, we should, as a nation, see very little romantic or picturesque in the Romany race. Negroes, like gipsies, are all very well as isolated figures in the social landscape, but they are out of place as a perpetual background. Still, with all this, I have often wondered at how very little the Americans I met with seemed to know about the negroes who lived amongst them. I tried frequently to obtain information from persons interested in the negro question, as to the prospects and position of the free negroes, but without much success. The truth is, the negroes, slave or free, are a race apart, in both North and South. A black Ruth might say to a white Naomi, "Thy God shall be my God;" but the promise that "Thy people shall be my people" would be uttered in vain.

Everywhere and at all seasons the coloured people form a separate community. In the public streets you hardly ever see a coloured person in company with a white, except in the capacity of servant. Boston, indeed, is the only town I visited where I ever observed black men and women walking about frequently with white people. I never by any chance, in the Free States, saw a coloured man dining at a public table,