[The people of the South, young and old, who were brought up under that social regimen which embodied the negro as a prominent and necessary feature, will appreciate the feelings of the writer when he states that he has not, and never can have, any feeling of enmity towards this race. Some of the tenderest passages in his heart history he is glad to refer to that period when negroes were not only admitted _en famille_ among the whites, but in innumerable instances given absolute control over the household affairs of their masters. He numbers among his cultured acquaintance scores of young men and maidens who never knew any other parentage, and who can never admit a dearer relation than their adopted paternity. The negroes, if vicious and mean, owe it to that cruel divorcement from the Southern social plan effected by their political leaders, and to the life of vagabondage to which they are doomed under the new system; they are not more so by nature than other men. If, therefore, the writer is tempted to speak of their weaknesses, it is in no irreverential sense, and with a laudable object in view, to which this policy will be seen to be strictly antecedent.] That the negro is by nature grossly superstitious, no one who has had even tolerable means of information will deny. In another chapter we have prevised something on general principles concerning the superstition of mankind, but the comparison to be drawn between the negro and all other branches of the Adamic tree, as to this particular fruitage, is so unequal, that we shall ask the reader to accept the former as a very modified presentation of a theory that was made to order for the crown of Cuffey. And however much this may be untrue with regard to other animals, this faculty of the individual under discussion has nothing whatever to do with his aesthetical being. It does not in any sense enlist that high poetic principle which is one of the conditions of his tropical nativity. Left to himself, with all the appliances of civilization and the encouragement of its examples about him, his superstition will subject him, in the short space of a twelvemonth, to heathenish lapses which the weak-headed Mongolian, under the same outward conditions, has resisted for a period of six thousand years. Voudooism is, perhaps, the weakest form of heathen worship which this moral condition has developed, and, despite the few occasions admitted by the structure of our laws, it is strictly a native product. Those who contend that it is an African transplant, or borrowed from the congeners of the race on those shores, are surely not guided by convictions derived from an examination into its philosophy. But it is a very radical form of savagism in worship, including human sacrifices among its rites, and as we have anticipated that it had its birth in the rice- and cotton-fields of the South, further remark on this division of the argument is deemed unnecessary.