What a glorious change for the better, my dear reader, has come over this Federal Union of ours in our own day! Well did the Jubilee Minstrels sing before the royal family of England, "No more Auction Blocks for Me!" For at the present day, instead of auction blocks and wronged and oppressed slaves being conveyed (in a fugitive way, under cover of the darkness of the night) from their pens to the ships, wailing and lamenting their sad fate, in the self-same city of Baltimore, at the present time thousands and tens of thousands of children, and men and women, wend their peaceful way to Sunday-school and church, walking the streets of the city in love and peace, on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the city of the Great King. And yet if anybody had told the slave-holder only fifty years ago that his darling "peculiar institution" was on its last legs, he would probably there and then have caused us to be lynched for our rashness of speech! As I have mentioned already in this book, preachers in the South in those days had even the audacity to preach sermons in the defence of slavery, and they were so bold as to select for their text: "This" (meaning slavery) "is the Lord’s doings; and it is wonderful in our eyes." Very wonderful, indeed, I should say. And the war for the extinction of slavery was the Lord’s doing, too, I suppose! And it also was wonderful in our eyes, indeed! If those miserable slave-traders were to rise from their graves to-day; were to hear colored minstrels singing in the courts of Europe, "No More Auction Blocks for Me!" and then were to see millions of colored children, youths and maidens wending their way to the happy Sunday-schools on the day of rest—even they also would be compelled to admire the great changes for the better, and to exclaim in a different sense, "Truly these are the Lord’s doings, and they are wonderful in our eyes!"