Thus from the beginning the North and the South were necessarily distinctive; settled under different circumstances, the one drew from England the stern, severe, and rigorously religious, while the other became the habitat for the Puritan’s opposite--the impecunious gentleman, the roistering cavalier, the insolvent debtor, and the Catholic nobleman--a class in which there had been a very general “reversion from virtuous and noble manhood to the lewdness of the ape and the cunning ferocity of the tiger.”[6] In the New World all alike were brought face to face with a great, overshadowing nature which presented the diversified physical conditions along which each section’s economic development would tend. Agriculture in austere New England would have been a too uneven wrestling with nature; existence wrought from the soil meant unending toil and often heart-breaking disappointment, so the New Englander’s pursuits became mercantile and seafaring--occupations in which the negro could be of little value, but following England’s initiative he found the slave-trade profitable, and the Southern planter a ready buyer. To repress Nature’s exuberance, the fields of tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo, and cane required man’s watchful care, and the negro, inured through all previous generations to the sun and rain, the jungle and the swamp, properly directed, became, and still is, the ideal laborer for work of the soil. Since then our “mental endyses” have been many; we have associations for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and sympathetic and indignant thrills pass through us at sight of ill-treatment to one of these, so we cannot bring our attitude of to-day or of the last hundred years to judge the beginnings of American slavery. To 16th and 17th century Europeans it was palpable that the difference between the negro and the man-like apes was no greater than that existing between the negro and themselves, and it was debatable “with that brutishness which commonly appeareth in all their actions whether the people generally may be thought to be men in the skins of beasts; or beasts created in the likenesse and shape of man.”[7] The sentimentality which obtained some years ago and which led to such bitter hatred and seems almost maudlin when that phase of the question in which the indescribable wretchedness of the negro in his native land is considered--his gross and pitiable superstitions, his indifference to death and his regard for cruelty as a virtue; what slavery did for him seems analogous to what we suppose primitive man accomplished with the wolf--adopted it from the wild and made of it a faithful, domestic animal. True, the motives were utility and gain, but who can deny the mighty uplift in value and sagacity, both for the dog and the negro? Among the African tribes described in Pigafetta’s account of Lopez’s _African Travels_ (1598), and spoken of by Heylyn in his _Cosmographie_ (1657), are the