Every now and then some surviving rebel in South Carolina, or some other of the late seceded States, takes upon himself to raise the old parrot-cry, "This is a white man’s government! Colored men shall not rule with us!" If the national government did its full duty, it would arrest such a man as this for trying to teach the rising generation falsehoods, and for disturbing the minds of the lieges. This is not a white man’s country, nor a black man’s country, nor a red man’s country—but it belongs to all alike. We have only to go back four hundred years, when this country belonged to the Indians, and if it belongs by right to anybody at all, it belongs to them. But Spaniards, Frenchmen, Englishmen and others came over the sea, they murdered or drove back the Indians, and stole away their lands. Then the self-same Europeans went to Africa, and killed and kidnapped the nations, and by physical force brought our ancestors here—and here we are at the present day. The war of revolution came; the colonists secured their own freedom, but they did not set their own slaves free. They complained that they were in subjection under the king of England, but they winked at the thraldom of our ancestors, and left us to languish in chains and slavery till the Lord sent the Civil War, and made us all free, while the three amendments to the Constitution put us on the self-same footing with white citizens, and here we are in our own country, part and parcel of the entire American population. This country, then, either belongs to the Lord from heaven, or it is the property of the North American Indian, or else it has become, in some way or other, the property of the whole of us. We had better not examine into our rights too closely, for we cannot go back more than four hundred years to establish our claims, and four hundred years will not go for much, especially with the owner—the Lord of Heaven. CHAPTER XXI. _A General Review of the Writer’s Entire Life and Work, and an Optimistic View of the Whole Subject, With Reflections and Observations and Forecasts of the Near Future._ When I left the place where I was born, in the year 1855, and made my lucky escape to a land of freedom, in company with my fiancee, Thomas Lincoln, I had no idea whatever of the future that lay before us, and of all the pleasant ways by which the Lord would lead us. It was well for both my darling Tom and me that we were the children of religious mothers, who taught us from our earliest infancy to love the Lord at all times, and to put our entire trust and confidence in Him. Tom and I had been accustomed to a delightful home at Riverside Hall, on the banks of the Ohio, and we knew nothing about the evils of slavery, like millions of others.