After seeing what contact with the whites had done for the negro, Lyell entertained very sanguine hopes of the race’s intellectual and moral possibilities, and was impatient of what seemed to him unjust laws which restricted the black educationally and politically. His two-sided attitude is a bit disarming, but is explained by himself. “We are often thrown into opposite states of mind and feeling, according as the interest of the white or negro happens, for the moment, to claim our sympathy.” But the following words embody an unbiased and a beautiful tribute to the influence of the Southerners: “In spite of prejudice and fear, and in defiance of stringent laws enacted against education, three million of a more enlightened and progressive race are brought into contact with an equal number of laborers lately in a savage state, and taken from a continent where the natives have proved themselves, for many thousand years, to be singularly unprogressive. Already their taskmasters have taught them to speak, with more or less accuracy, one of the noblest of languages, to shake off many old superstitions, to acquire higher ideals of morality, and habits of neatness and cleanliness, and have converted thousands of them to Christianity. Many they have emancipated, and the rest are gradually approaching to the condition of the ancient serfs of Europe half a century or more before their bondage died out. “All this has been done at an enormous sacrifice of time and money; an expense, indeed, which all the Governments of Europe and all the Christian missionaries, whether Romanist or Protestant, could never have effected in five centuries. Even in the few States which I have already visited since I crossed the Potomac, several hundred thousand whites of all ages, among whom the children are playing by no means the least effective part, are devoting themselves with greater or less activity to these involuntary educational exertions.” THE END [1] _Reprinted from “South Atlantic Quarterly,” July, 1908._ [2] Smith’s _Historie of Virginia_.