just came a monstrous African black! O dear, how black he was! Fat! bless me, he looked like a barrel (no, a sugar hogshead) of tar, so black, so fat! What an aggravation, with the thermometer at 90° in the shade! * We should have taken this for the irrepressible overflow of harmless witticism but for other disparaging references to the negro. To Miss Hunt he writes, under date November 10, 1857: There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble relation to the rest of men, and always will. For two generations what a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in New England! But in twenty generations the negroes will stand just where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared. In Massachusetts there are no laws now to keep the black man from any pursuit, any office, that he will; but there has never been a rich negro in New England; not a man with ten thousand dollars, perhaps none with five thousand dollars; none eminent in any thing except the calling of a waiter.t Again: "In respect to the power of civilization, the African is at the bottom, the American Indian next." Again: "When slavery is abolished, the African population will decline in the United States, and die out of the South as out of Northampton and Lexington." § Mr. Parker, after all he said and did for freedom, seems to have had an invincible contempt for weak and oppressed races. He waged uncompromising warfare against the process by which such peoples are degraded, but had no charity toward those suffering from the results of such process. He fought against the parent, and ridiculed the offspring. The abstract to him was hateful; the concrete examples contemptible or ludicrous. He scorned the Irish and laughed at the negro. He speaks of the Irish as follows: I don't know but these Paddies are worse than the Africans to the country. We made a great mistake in attracting them here and allowing them to vote under less than twenty-one years of quarantine. Certainly it would take all that time to clean a Paddy on the outside I mean; to clean him inwardly would be like picking up all the sands of the Sahara. There would be nothing left when the sands were gone. || It is a pity that in speaking of the "gintleman from Car-r-r-k," as in caricature he describes the Irishman, and of "the poor wretches from Africa," he did not conform to his own canon of criticism. Speaking of Pierpont, he says: "Just now, considering all that he has done and suffered, it would seem a little ungenerous to be quite just. All pictures must be painted in reference to the light they are to hang in and be looked at.” * Mr. Parker knew the "light" of prejudice and contempt in which his picture of the negro was to "hang," and yet, mak-. ing no allowance for circumstances, and uninfluenced by the laws of moderation, he holds the balance between light and shade with an indifferent hand, paints in the gloomicst possible colors, and thus encourages rather than disarms the falsifying faculty of the observer predisposed to an unfavorable impression. Would Mr. Parker have joined Dennis Kearney, and raised a crusade in favor of the inhospitable legislation proposed by the opponents of Chinese immigration? In view of the splendid results in the United States and in the world generally of the manly struggle which Mr. Parker maintained for truth and freedom-in view of the large sacrifices which he unquestionably made in the cause of free humanity-many errors of temper and judgment on his part may be forgotten; but the negro can never forget the slurs upon his race, of which, however, no one, perhaps, more readily than Mr. Parker would now admit the impolicy if not the injustice. For how do such utterances differ in character and effects from those of the Notts and Gliddons, of the Calhouns and Jeff. Davises? And the fact—which should be suggestive to thinking negroes in the United States-that they are reproduced in the biography by Mr. Frothingham, shows that there is a feeling that they are the proper thing to say, even now, about the negro. Can Congressional legislation remedy the evils produced by such caricatures and misrepresentations? Congress may decree civil rights to the "despised" race in America, and the exigencies of party may occasionally bring the negro to the front; but what progress can he make when a public sentiment against him is fostered in the writings and in the private intercourse of his "Biography," p. 329. friends? In the language of the Liberian Declaration of Rights, "Public sentiment, more powerful than law, will ever frown him down." The negro, pure and simple, may rely upon it that for him the most enthusiastic of his benefactors sees nothing but the lowest occupations. In the case of the most liberal of his advocates he will have occasionally to exclaim, Et tu, Brute! A writer in the Methodist Quarterly Review for January, 1875, on "The Negro," has the following among the closing sentences of an able and plausible defense of the race: Without the negro the top-stone of our national greatness will not be lifted to its predestined lofty altitude for centuries yet to come. Expatriate the negro, and our cotton-fields whiten no more; our turpentine orchards become silent as the grave; our rice-fields grow up into canebrakes, sheltering the alligator and wild boar. But does the American conscience ever look forward to the time when, in the United States, the negro will have any common interest in, or any, the slightest possible, control over, the political and financial elements of the country-when he will be needed as a part of the directing agency in the halls of legislation, in counting-houses, and in banking establishments? Mr. Parton, in the "North American Review," says: The South is most happy in possessing the negro; for it is through his assistance that there will be the grand agriculture in the Southern States, which cannot flourish unless there is a class to labor and individuals to contrive. The Southern farmer, by the black man's help, can be a "scholar and a gentleman," and at the same time secure and elevate the black man's life. Such utterances "give color to the idea" that the negro was made to live and improve only in the service and under the guidance of a superior. If this view is correct, then why does not the great Creator allow the elect masters to have free access and safe incursion into the natural home of the created slaves, and live in a land where they might hold their predestined protégés in unlimited numbers and in comfortable service? Why did He make for the slaves so magnificent a country, and surround it with a wall of fire, so that if the master comes to the threshold he either beats a hasty retreat or perishes in the attempt to penetrate? "Massa run away, No; the destiny of the negro and his marvelous country is veiled from the view of the outside world according to the wise and beneficent purposes of Omniscience. "God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain." He can wait, if the impatient Caucasian cannot. The American Missionary Association, whose publications we have prefixed to this paper, in their work of lofty and noble purpose throughout the South are endeavoring to prepare the negro for higher spheres, of labor than "cotton-fields, turpentine orchards, and rice-fields." Every negro who is at all acquainted with matters in the United States must have the highest admiration for that Association. Almost alone among the benevolent institutions of that land in the days of the great struggle, they never for one moment yielded to the imperious. dictates of an oligarchical monopoly, but gave expression to the idea which they inscribed upon their banner, that one of the chief purposes of their organization was to resist the tyranny of the autocracy which doomed the negro to perpetual servitude. No one could be enrolled among the members of their society who was "a slave-holder." They have the gratitude of the negro race. But history will have a brighter page than even that with which to adorn their annals when she comes to recount the devotion and sacrifices of the hundreds who have been sent forth under their auspices as uplifters of the prostrate host in the South, to whom, left as they were paralyzed by slavery, free movement and real progress were intrinsically impossible without the aid of such agencies as the American Missionary Association. As time rolls on the romance which clings to those heroes who fought to unfetter the body of the slave will fade beside the halo which will surround those who have labored to liberate his mind. We have read with the deepest interest the report and some of the addresses made at the Thirty-second Anniversary of this Association, held in October, 1878, as well as letters from various portions of the field under its supervision. In reading the accounts of the struggles and sufferings of the missionaries, their sorrows and disappointments, their battles and their vic tories among the lowly in remote and sequestered districts, it is often impossible to repress the tears-tears of sympathy, of gratitude, and of joy. At the Annual Meeting Rev. C. M. Southgate said: We heard words of hearty praise this afternoon, telling of the success of the work. They tell hardly enough. But these efforts should be redoubled. We want more institutions like those at Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, and the other large Southern cities where high culture and intelligence rule. The scholarship can be compared without fear with similar grades at the North. I never heard in our boasted common schools such recitations as I have heard from boys as black as the blackest. I know what Yale and Harvard and Dartmouth can show; but in Greek and Latin those colored students can rival their excellence. The culture in morals and manners is at least not inferior, nor the religious instruction less fruitful. The report from the Churches shows as large and as healthy success as we can show here. The young men and women in these institutions have an intense longing to be at work for the Master. The desperate condition of their race rests upon them like a pall. God is making them his prophets, and speaking through them, and sending redemption. Rev. Dr. Bascom, in a letter from Alabama, says: I see abundant proofs of the beneficent work of your Society here. Could its influence have been exerted in like manner among all our colored people of the South, the problem so perplexing to politicians and philanthropists, as to the future of this class in our country, would have been already solved. The committee on the "Normal Work of the Association " reported that: The eagerness of the colored people to obtain at least a rudimentary education has ever been a most encouraging sign. The young man who last year walked fifty miles with his trunk upon his back that he might enter school, recalls the zeal of the late Dr. Godell, of Constantinople, who, in his youth, also walked sixty miles with a trunk strapped upon his back, that he might enter Phillips Academy, at Andover. The demand for teachers from the normal schools-quite beyond the ability to supply them -is one of the surest indications that the schools are meeting an urgent need. We regret that Professor Hartranft, in his able address on the "Five Tests of American Civilization," should have spoken of the "brutality of the negro." In what portion of the United States has that "brutality" been shown? Such a charge is in |