Even

attendance has been multiplied very nearly six times. were we to stop here, the result must be characterised as the achievement of a great success. By painful experience we ourselves have learnt the difficulty of educating a people. Though we have been engaged upon the task here at home for nearly half a century, we are even now only laying the foundation of a really national system. Yet here in England we brought to the undertaking every advantage,-an ancient civilisation, a dense population on a small area, unlimited wealth, boundless public spirit, widely distributed scholarship, and, above all and beyond all, the priceless advantage of a united people. In the Southern States, on the other hand, all the conditions were reversed. Everything was new, every distance was vast, every person was poor, and class was every divided. To have made so much progress in spite of such heavy disadvantages is certainly no mean achievement. Nor is the progress confined to any part of the country. In 1860 there were in Alabama only 114 coloured persons at school, in 1870 there were 15,815; in 1860 the attendance in Arkansas was 5, in 1870 it was 5,784; in Louisiana the increase is from 275 to 11,076; and in South Carolina it is from 365 to 16,865. These figures tell their own story, and it is only fair to credit the Government with the good work it is now shown to be performing.

age

While the children are thus being sent to school, the women are simultaneously ceasing to go out into the fields to work. Of the entire female population over ten years of less than one in three is engaged in any kind of occupation in South Carolina. In Alabama the proportion is considerably under one in four; in Louisiana it is still lower, being but slightly over one in five; while in Arkansas it is more than twice as low still, being only just one in eleven. The figures we are here dealing with, it will be understood, represent white as well as black women, and single girls from the age of ten up, as well as wives and mothers. Moreover, they include all kinds of occupations-school-teaching, shopkeeping, bar-tending, needlework, domestic service, and field labour; everything, in short, in which women are employed, except housekeeping for their own families. It will be evident at a glance that they prove the negroes to have made a very considerable stride in the path of material progress. It is true, indeed, that in these sunny climes life is sustained on a very slight modicum of food, which an extremely moderate amount of labour suffices to raise. It is also true that the scale of living to which the negroes have

been accustomed is such as to make them content with the coarsest and poorest kind of subsistence, and that as regards dwellings they put up with accommodation scarcely fit for cattle. Still, making all due allowance for these considerations, the fact remains that after a few brief years of freedom the negroes are able and are willing to maintain the great majority of their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters without any necessity on the part of these to earn wages. The fact excites frequent and bitter complaint amongst the whites, for it very seriously diminishes the available supply of labour. For many processes connected with the cultivation of cotton. women and children are in greater demand than men. Hence, the withdrawal of both women and children from the cotton fields, which we have now shown to be taking place, really does hamper agriculture, and press very heavily on the encumbered planters. But as regards the negro race itself there can be no doubt at all of the invaluable importance to its future welfare of this withdrawal. From the report of the Royal Commission on the employment of women and children we know what the consequences are even among our own people of the prolonged daily absence from home of mothers at work. We can, then, understand what those consequences must be among a race just emerging from savagery through the discipline of slavery. And, in fact, as we have already explained, the frightfully high infant mortality shown by the Health Reports of the Southern cities to prevail everywhere among the negroes, is mainly due to this cause. But when the women devote themselves to the care of their homes, the feelings and the duties of motherhood will naturally and inevitably begin to assert their proper sway over them. Although, then, the negroes have purchased their freedom with intense suffering, with widespread distress, with many deaths, they have not undergone their long agony in vain. They are beginning to avail themselves of the means at hand for their elevation as thinking and moral beings. They have founded for themselves homes of a kind, and are able to retain in them the mothers of their children. And thus they have made the first difficult step in the painful upward struggle towards a higher and a better civilisation.

All things considered, then, the condition of the freedmen as revealed to us in the Census Reports is as favourable as could reasonably have been expected. But beyond and above all other advantages, it must never be forgotten that they have now ceased to be chattels. They are men and women with rights and duties like any other, and the sanctity of their

persons is hedged around by all the safeguards of law. This is a gain that outweighs a multitude of evils. If now we ask, what gain can their former masters show as the result of these ten years ? we can point to but one, and that, we are afraid, they would themselves regard as a loss. They, too, have got rid of slavery, with its demoralising influence on their conduct, their character, and their tone of thought. In getting rid of it they suffered with altogether unnecessary severity; partly owing to their own ungovernable pride, their contempt of compromise, and haughty confidence in themselves, and partly owing to the want of statesmanship, the ignorance of their own minds, and the shifty trickiness of those who directed the councils of the North. But though the suffering on all sides was excessive, and in the South, at least, will long continue to be felt, the abolition of slavery was in itself a blessing to all concerned. Henceforward the Southern whites will no longer be able to look upon labour as a disgrace, nor will their least estimable members have ready to hand a helpless class on whom the law will permit them to gratify their baser nature. They will, therefore, have to cultivate the homelier, more practical, but more amiable virtues. That they will adapt themselves to their altered circumstances we cannot doubt, when we bear in mind that, as already shown, they actually increased during the decade, notwithstanding all their losses in war, very nearly nine per cent. At the same time, it is certain that, if they are to hold their own, they must somehow contrive to attract immigrants to their States. Immigration is adding every year to the North and West nearly half a million of persons, besides several millions of capital, is with fabulous rapidity building great cities, erecting new States, opening up vast regions larger than the most powerful of European empires. But from every part of the South, excepting Missouri alone, it carefully turns away, as if a curse rested upon the country: and a curse does rest upon the country which thus repels the stream that would fertilise its fields, and restore vigour to its war-wasted population.

We have said a moment ago that the abolition of slavery was a blessing to all concerned; we must admit in honesty, however, that to the Southern whites it was a blessing which came in a very questionable shape. It is usually estimated that at the outbreak of the war each slave was worth on an average about five hundred dollars. At that rate, the aggregate value of all the slaves would have considerably exceeded 400,000,000l. sterling, the amount of the entire national debt of the United States, and double the indemnity, which, when

imposed by Germany upon France, appeared to all Europe so crushing as to induce the belief that it would cripple France for a generation. But the population of France is about six times as large as the white population of the slave States. At the close of a still more exhausting war, therefore, a people onesixth of the French in numbers had to bear a fine twice as heavy. That is to say, population for population emancipation cost the Southern whites twelve times the French indemnity. Or, to put the matter in a more concrete form, supposing the loss to have fallen equally upon every white man, woman, and child in the slave States, it would have amounted to between 50l. and 607. for each! The sum seems so incredibly large that one feels disposed to reject the estimate as impossible, and to ask how, if it were correct, anybody in the South could have escaped bankruptcy? It must be remembered, however, that, as a general rule, the slaveowners were large landed proprietors. They were not so always, indeed. On the contrary, many amongst them were widows, children, unmarried women, and other helpless persons, whose natural protectors had invested the provision made for them in slaves, as the most valuable of all kinds of property. To these persons, of course, emancipation was utter ruin. Still these were a minority. The majority, as we have said, were landowners. The lands were not confiscated, and in order to live the negroes were obliged to come to terms with their former masters, and continue cultivating their plantations. Moreover, the plantations produced cotton specially prized in Europe, and various other commodities, such as sugar and tobacco, for which there was likewise a brisk demand. Thus, though there was great embarrassment, though many of the planters sank under their difficulties, the greater number was able to struggle through. To guard against misconception it may be desirable to say here, what it is, of course, unnecessary to point out to the reader, that, however valuable the slaves were to their owners, from a national point of view they did not constitute property at all. To the nation it was their productive capacity which alone was of value, and they lost no part of that by emancipation. The four hundred millions, then, is not to be reckoned as part of the cost of the war, as so much property subtracted from the wealth of the United States, nor even from the wealth of the Southern States, but only from the wealth of the white inhabitants of those States who happened to have owned slaves.

If we would know what has been the permanent loss of the South in its corporate capacity, we must determine what, irre

spective of the slaves, has been the deterioration of property there since 1860. To do this, however, it is not enough to simply compare the table of values in the two censuses. We must first make allowance for the fact that in 1860 the money of the United States was gold, and in 1870 inconvertible paper. Now, in 1870 the premium on gold averaged 234 throughout the year; that is to say, the paper dollar was worth somewhat more than eighty cents in gold. To compare the valuation of 1860 with that of 1870, we must, therefore, strike off one-fifth from the valuation of the latter year. When we have done this, we find that, deducting the worth of the slaves, the value of the real and personal property of the eleven Confederate States in 1860 amounted to 640,446,2007.; in 1870 the value had fallen to 473,979,3167. The depreciation of property in the ten years had been, therefore, over 27 per cent., or not very far short of six shillings in the pound. It will be recollected that this is actual loss-loss of property that once existed; consequently, it conveys a very inadequate notion of the real impoverishment of the South. The rate of increase in the value of property all over the Union during the decade averaged about 100 per cent. In some States, such as New York, the rate approached double the average, but for the whole Union, with all the waste of the war, and including the South, it was as stated. If the rate had reached this average in the South, the value of the real and personal property of the Confederate States would now be nearly 1,280,000,000l. sterling, whereas, as we have seen, it is very little more than onethird as much. Including, then, the prevention of increase, as well as the actual loss, we find that the South is now poorer than it ought to be by a sum greater than the whole National debt of Great Britain-and this, be it remembered, takes no account of the retardation of production all over the Union in consequence of the war! It would be futile, however, to attempt to estimate the loss on a basis including this new element of retardation.

If now we proceed to inquire on what kinds of property this tremendous loss more especially fell, we find that it was pretty equally distributed over all the constituents of wealth in the South. For example, the value of all the farms in the States that seceded was considerably under one-half their value as returned in the census of 1860. More even than this, it was actually less than the value returned twenty years previously. In other words, to use the striking expression of an American writer, in agriculture the South has retrograded a quarter of a century. The full significance of this fact only