resembling it, would obviously be impossible. The interest of parents in their children, years after they have left home—their grandchildren, etc., though separated thousands of miles—their letters to them, their visits to the old homestead, and the ten thousand other nameless things that bind together those of the same blood, constitute a large portion of our social existence, and is indeed an essential part of our civilization. And _all_ of this is dependent on the affections and in harmony with the elevated intellectualism of the race, the breadth and strength of the former corresponding, of course, with the mental endowments and specific capabilities of the Caucasian. The negro, of course, is endowed with affections, approximating in some respects, indeed in many respects, to those of our own race, but there are some things, some qualities in his emotional nature utterly different, and then again some things specific with us totally absent in the negro. The mother has a similar love for her offspring at an early period in its existence, possibly stronger, or rather more imperatively instinctive, than that of the white woman. Instances are not unfrequent among the lower classes in England, and other European countries, where mothers destroy their offspring, and painful as it is to acknowledge it, the same thing sometimes happens at the North; but though an instance of the kind is possible, there have been so few among negroes at the South as to warrant us in saying that not one person in a thousand has ever heard of such a thing. It is true, the negro is in a normal condition, and the European peasant is, to a certain extent, in an abnormal one, and vice and crime, and consequent misery, are always in exact proportion to the extent of the latter in all races. Nevertheless, it is quite certain that, both living under equally favorable circumstances, the negress is less likely to destroy the life of her offspring than is the white woman. Her maternal instincts are more imperative, more closely approximate to the animal, while that sense of degradation which the higher nature and more elevated sensibilities of the white woman prompts to the hiding of her shame by the destruction of her offspring, is entirely absent in the negress. She may possibly destroy her child in a paroxysm of rage, but here nature has guarded her too strongly by the imperative maternal instinct, while those ten thousand chances in our higher habitudes and social complications which may involve the most exquisite suffering of the unhappy mother, and impel her, by one terrible and supreme crime, to destroy her own offspring, can never happen or influence the negro mother.