In whatever way sudden, universal and unqualified emancipation was to be enforced, if it was to happen the negro could not be prepared for freedom. He must take his freedom without one single aid from the white man to fit him to receive it. Wise and thoughtful statesmen saw this—the abolitionist did not see it. Men who had passed their lives in the business of legislation and government, knew full well, not only that the fundamental political bond of the Union forbade interference by the people of the free States with the domestic institutions of the slave States, but that emancipation without any training for freedom could not be a blessing. Men who had passed their lives in an emotional agitation for instant freedom did not see or did not care for the inevitable fact, that freedom for which no preparation had been made could not be a boon. When the emancipation came, it came as an act of force applied in a civil war and in the settlements which the war was claimed to have entailed as necessities. No preparatory legislation, no helpful training in morality and virtue, no education, no discipline of the human being for his new condition, had prepared the negro to be a freeman. While, therefore, it may be and probably is true, that the whites of our Southern States have reason to rejoice, and do rejoice, in the change which they deprecated and against which they struggled, it is not true that the colored race have the same reason for thankfulness. The Christianity and the philanthropy of this age have before them a task that is far more serious, more weighty and more difficult, than it would have been if the emancipation had been a regulated process, even if its final consummation had been postponed for generations. To this day, after twenty years of freedom, the church, the press, society and benevolence have to encounter such questions as these:—Whether the negro is by nature vicious, intractable, thriftless—the women incurably unchaste, the men incurably dishonest; whether the vices and the failings that are so deplorable, and apparently so remediless, are to be attributed to centuries of slavery, or are taints inherent in the blood. Who can doubt that all such questions could have been satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity of the South had been left to its own time and mode of answering them, and without any external force but the force of kindly respectful coöperation and forbearing Christian fellowship. It is a cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad domain of this Republic—that our theory and our practice are now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious lives and untold millions of money.