Mrs. Stowe, in one of the most striking passages of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, suggests a comparison between Eva and Topsy, the one, the child of refined and educated parents, and coming of a race in which refinement and education had bettered the blood from generation to generation; the other, born of ages of oppression, barbarism, bestial ignorance and sin. The comparison might be pushed to a conclusion Mrs. Stowe does not draw. How _can_ the brain, thus cramped and debased from father to son, at one bound, rise to the hight of the Anglo-Saxon mind, which these generations of culture have been broadening and strengthening? Enthusiasts tell us that the negro mind is to-day as good as that of the white; but I doubt if ten or fifteen years of education on these Sea Islands will prove it. They seem to me, in some cases, to have as _much_ intellect as the whites; but it is in the rough, is torpid, needs to be vitalized and quickened, and brought under control. Things which require no strong or complex intellectual effort—how to read, how to manage their farms, or bargain for the sale of watermelons—they learn quickly and well. An average negro child will learn its letters, and read cleverly in the First Reader, in three months. The average of white children do little, if any, better. But the negroes who are to make rapid progress in the higher branches, or who are to be proficients in skilled labor, have not yet been found abundantly on the Sea Islands. So their moral faculties seem to me to be torpid, like their minds. Their religion seems rather a paroxysm of the affections than an intelligent conviction; and it is only beginning to lay hold upon the realities of their daily lives. Their affections, whether toward God or toward their neighbors, are unquestionably lively, but of doubtful depth. One sees, however, scarcely a trace of revengeful feeling toward their old masters. If good passions are shallow, so, too, are bad ones. Nor do I see any element whatever out of which a negro insurrection could now, or ever could have been, evolved. The enterprise which risks present pains and dangers for future good is not now a characteristic of the Sea-Island negroes. If it come at all, it must come—as it has _not_ yet, to some of the most cultivated peoples in the world—with the education and aspirations of comparative freedom. [Illustration: _Forts at Savannah.—Page 131._] CHAPTER XIII. Pulaski—Savannah—Bonaventure.