“In fact,” she remarked with womanly intuition, “I can see no reason for their having had slaves at the outset. Why couldn’t the Negroes have served us, from the first, as _freemen_, just as they did after their emancipation? What was the necessity for adopting a system that gave a chance for the brutal passions of bad men to vent themselves? The whole country has suffered in its moral tone because of slavery, and we are not as pure minded a nation to-day as we should have been without it.” I replied that it was commercialism that fixed slavery in the nation and rooted and grounded it so deep that scarcely could it be eradicated without destroying the nation itself. I noticed that she had none of the Southern woman’s prejudice against “Yankees,” so prevalent in my day, and that she was far enough removed from the events of the Civil War to look at them dispassionately. What a difference doth time make in people and nations. What is wisdom to-day may be the grossest folly to-morrow, and the popular theme of to-day maybe ridiculed later on. Ye “men of the hour” beware! The much despised Yankee has taught the South many lessons in industry, in the arts, sciences and literature, but none more valuable to her than to forsake her prejudice against the evolution of the Negro. We rode out to Chattahoochee farm, noted for its picturesqueness and “up-to-dateness,” a paying institution entirely under the management of Negroes. The superintendent was a graduate from the State Agricultural College for Negroes, near Savannah. “Are there any other farms of this kind in the state under Negro management,” I asked. She replied that there were many, that a majority of the landowners of the state had found it profitable to turn vast tracts of land over to these young Negro graduates, who were proving themselves adepts in the art of scientific farming, making excellent salaries, and returning good dividends on the investments. I remarked that I used to wonder why this could not be done with the young Negroes coming out from such schools--since their ante-bellum fathers were so successful in this line--and I further said that this movement might have been inaugurated in my day, but for the opposition of the politicians, who approached the Negro question generally with no sincere desire to get effective results, but to make political capital for themselves. She at once suggested, “And so you believe it was a good idea then to dispense with the politicians?” “Indeed,” said I, “they were horrible stumps in the road of progress.”