Our cities and towns are filled to overflowing with poverty, ignorance, vice, and misery, and though much of this is the direct result of the wrongs and oppressions of the Old World, and all of it legitimate consequences of the European practice which yet prevails among us, especially in the States most connected by commerce, literature, and opinion with the Old World, our social progress is small, indeed, compared with our political enlightenment. But the masses are, however slow the progress, becoming more and more intelligent, and consequently more virtuous and happy, for, however frequent the exceptions among individuals, morality among the masses always keeps pace with their intelligence. And though the social condition at the South is less, infinitely less defective than at the North, and social progress in the future has a comparatively circumscribed field of action, there are many things, doubtless, which, in the future time, will be widely altered from the present. God has organized and fixed the nature and relations of His creatures, so that there is no conflict of duties, and that which best secures the happiness of ourselves, also accomplishes the happiness of others, whether they be our equals or our inferiors, men of our own race or negroes. Thus, when the dominant race—the citizenship of the South—comprehend most clearly and truly what their own welfare demands, then, too, and of necessity, will the best interests of the negro be secured. The perverse fanatics at the North, who, unmindful of, and indeed dead to the woes of their suffering brethren, imagine the most terrible miseries among negroes at the South, can not continue much longer in their unnatural delusions, and when the pressure of their attempted interference is withdrawn, earnest and conscientious citizens will doubtless inquire into those possible social defects that may exist among them, and strive to apply the appropriate corrections. What these defects may consist in, the writer does not assume to decide or to understand, but after a long-continued and patient investigation of the social condition of the South, he thinks he can not be mistaken when he declares that they are wholly or mainly confined to the citizenship, and he is wholly and absolutely incapable of comprehending any wrong whatever in the fundamental social relations of the races or so-called slavery of the South. CHAPTER XVII. EDUCATION OF NEGROES.