The negro has never taken one step towards mental development, as we understand it. He has never invented an alphabet—that primal starting-point in mental cultivation—he has never comprehended even the simplest numerals—in short, has had no instruction and can give no instruction except that which is verbal and imitated, which the child copies from the parents, which is limited to the existing generation, and therefore the present generation are in the same condition that their progenitors occupied thousands of years ago. But the Almighty has adapted him to a very different condition from this fixed and non-progressive savagism. All the subordinate races have a certain capacity for imitating the higher habitudes of the Caucasian, unless it be the Mongol, which, perhaps, does not possess this faculty. The English have been masters in Hindostan for more than a century—their power rests on the same tenure of force on which it was founded—they have made no impression whatever on the habitudes of the Hindostanee—their language, their schools, their religion, their mental habits, are untouched, and it may be doubted if God ever designed that they should be in juxtaposition or made subject to a superior race. In regard to the negro, there can be no doubt, not merely because, by himself, he is a non-producing and non-advancing savage, but because his entire structure, mental and physical, is adapted to juxtaposition. All the other races have a certain specific character to overcome first, or to be understood and properly harmonized, but the negro is a blank, a wilderness, a barren waste, waiting for the husbandman or the Caucasian teacher to develop his real worth, and gifted with his wonderful imitative powers, he not only never resists, but reaching forth his hands for guidance and protection, at once accepts his teacher, and submits himself to his control. Of the four millions now in our midst, a considerable proportion are the children of native Africans, indeed, there are not a few natives still among us, and yet everything connected with Africa—their traditions, language, religion, even their names have wholly disappeared. The Normans conquered the Saxons eight centuries ago, but the Saxon names, and even their language, are now as entirely Saxon as if a Norman had never landed on the shores of England. This blank, this feeble mental capacity and readiness of the negro nature to imitate the habits, bodily or mental, of the superior race, adapts the negro to his subordinate social position, and the purposes to which Providence has assigned him. The child-like intellect does not resist the strong and enduring mental energies of the Caucasian—its first impressions pass away in a few years, while its imitative capacities sit so gracefully on the negro nature that multitudes of ignorant people confound the real with the borrowed, and actually suppose that the “smart” negroes to be met with occasionally at the North are examples of native capacity.