At the time of his birth, some forty-three or forty-four years ago--the exact place or time being alike unknown--the public sentiment in regard to emancipation had made great advances, and this had been effected chiefly through the diffusion of millions of copies of Mrs H. B. Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. Among those in this country who believed the descriptions in that work to be exaggerated, and that Legree was a non-existent character, we have to include Charles Dickens. At the same time, that famous novelist, in common with some others, probably clearly saw that the days of slavery were numbered. "In truth, it must be so," remarked one journalist at the time when _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was the most popular book both in the Old and the New World. "In truth, it must be so, for the very laws of population forbid the permanence of slavery in America. The black man thrives where the white man decays, and it is the knowledge of this very remarkable fact that in great part accounts for the dislike to the coloured population which is everywhere expressed in the United States." The social inequality of the negroes and the whites struck people then, as it does to-day in this country, as being one of the most marked features of American society. There is probably no remedy for that state of things, and it is partly through his recognising this fact, and knowing that the negroes must continue to be a race by themselves, that Booker Washington's success has been what it is. Meanwhile, what kind of existence was the everyday life on a plantation "down South" in the days of Booker Washington's childhood? By way of reply, take this vivid word-picture from Mr Casey's _Two Years on the Farm of Uncle Sam_, which was published in the decade of our hero's birth:--