the proprietor of the estate for liberty to graze their cattle in the woods, and other little aids. They are a good-natured, easily-managed race, and they are always ready to accept a good spell of work, for a time at least. Proprietors so situated get plenty of labour when they want it on the lands they cultivate themselves, and for any improvements and operations that they may undertake.

On the whole I am very agreeably surprised to find the position of the emancipated blacks so good, and the industrial relations between them and the whites so little strained and difficult. They are, as a rule, good labourers and very tolerable cultivators. A gentleman who has had much experience of them, and who now labours among them in one of the most negro parts of Virginia, in describing their character said that one might take about one-third of them to be really good and progressive; another third to be so far well-inclined and well-doing that, with good management and judicious treatment, they may be made good; and the remaining third to be bad. I am inclined to think, from what I saw and learned elsewhere, that this description is more correct of a particular tract, in which many of the best and the worst of the race congregated during the war, than of the country generally; and that in reality both the good, thrifty men who have shown a capacity for independence, and the bad, who prefer idleness and thieving to work, are far less than this saying im plies, the great majority being in the second category, who so far do well that under favourable circumstances

But

they will settle down into an excellent peasantry. It seemed to me that the present situation gives very good ground of hope, and I am sanguine of a favourable issue. The position of the cultivators is such that they may well, with a little kindly aid, become independent farmers; and any man inclined to work honestly and well can earn sufficiently good wages.

All that is now wanted to make the negro a fixed and conservative element in American society is to give him encouragement to, and facilities for, making himself, by his own exertions, a small landowner; to do, in fact, for him what we have sought to do for the Irish farmer. Land in America is so much cheaper and more abundant, that it would be infinitely easier to effect the same object there. I would by no means seek to withdraw the whole population from hired labour; on the contrary, the negro in many respects is so much at his best in that function, that I should look to a large class of labourers remaining; but I am at the same time confident that it would be a very great benefit and stability to the country if a large number should acquire by thrift an independent position as landowning American citizens.

Supposing things to settle down peaceably, as I hope they may, I go so far as to say that, though nothing is perfect in this world, the American blacks are in a fair way of becoming a comfortable, well-to-do population to a degree found in very few countries; a condition which may compare very favourably not only with the Indian ryot, the Russian serf, or the Irish tenant-farmer, but also with the Dorsetshire

labourer. I doubt whether, on the whole, a better labouring population, more suited to the climate and country in which they find themselves, is anywhere to be found. The whites certainly cannot do without them; already the great drawback to the Southern States is the want of that great influx of foreign population which causes the North and West to progress in a geometrical ratio. Evidently their true policy is to make the most of the excellent population which they have, and they quite see it. The blacks, again, certainly cannot do without the whites; their own race is not sufficiently advanced to fulfil the functions now in the hands of the whites.

Newly-educated classes, among races hitherto kept down, are apt to over-estimate their own acquirements and powers; that is the tendency of the educated Hindoos of Calcutta and Bombay, and the same tendency shows itself among the educated mulattos and blacks in America. It is scarcely surprising that they should chafe against the social ostracism of all who have dark blood in their veins, and should long for a Utopia in which educated coloured men own no superior; but I think they are entirely wrong in preaching as they now do to their countrymen the advantages of emigration to Liberia-which, however, they do not themselves practise. Probably there could be no more notable example of the want of practical ability in these men, than their management of the last exodus from Charleston to Liberia. The whole thing was a purely coloured movement, and the management was in coloured hands. It seems to

have been terribly mismanaged; and the result was that, after much loss and suffering on the voyage, some of the best of the coloured people who had accumulated money enough to set them up most comfortably in farms of their own in America, were drained of everything they possessed for the expenses of the voyage, and landed in a country where they could earn as labourers about half what they could in their native America, the cost of living being also infinitely dearer. My advise would certainly be-to the blacks in America, 'Stay at home, and make the best of an excellent situation,'--to the whites, 'Do all you can to keep these people, conciliate them, and make the most of them.' I am confident that this may and will be done, if only political difficulties and unsettlements do not mar the prospect, and in this view I must now look at the political situation.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE SOUTH.

The population of the principal Southern States may be roughly stated to be about half black and half white; that is, putting aside Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and such intermediate States. Of the firstmentioned States the blacks are in a considerable majority in South Carolina and one or two more; in the others the whites are somewhat more numerous. Before the war the blacks were almost all slaves. I think the idea prevalent in Europe was that the

Southern whites were composed of an aristocracy of slave-owning gentlemen, refined and polished, with their dependent slave-drivers, and a large number of very inferior whites, known as 'mean whites,' 'white trash,' and so on, who were rather an encumbrance than otherwise. It seems to me that this view is not justified. The population was very much divided geographically; there was the great black belt on the lower lands, where a few whites ruled over a large slave population; and there was a broad upper belt in the hilly country, where the great bulk of the population was white, mostly small farmers owning their land. No doubt education was much more backward in the South than in the North, and the people were probably less pushing; but I have been very favourably impressed by these Southern whites, many of whom are of Scotch-Irish (i. e., Northern Presbyterian Irish) or Highland Scotch blood; they seemed to be a handsome, steady, industrious people; and if somewhat primitive in their ways, and humble in the character of their houses and belongings, they are curiously self-supporting and independent of the outer world; they raise their own food, and to this day their wives weave their clothes from their own wool and cotton; and, if not rich, they have few wants. There is, no doubt, in all these Southern States a large intermediate zone in which white and black are much intermixed; but even there they are a good deal aggregated in patchwork fashion, the general rule apparently being that the rich slaveowners have occupied the best lands, and the

poorer