Marriage, is of course, a natural relation among negroes as well as ourselves, and were it true that these four millions of people were living without it, then the denunciations heaped upon the people of the South would doubtless be merited. But a moment’s reflection should be sufficient to convince any one, at all events any American, that with a different nature, with different faculties, different wants, and different duties of these people, there must follow a different form or modification of this relation. The negro is substantially a child or undeveloped and undevelopable man, with affections, moral wants and faculties approximating, of course, to our own, but yet so different that his happiness as well as that of the white man demands a corresponding development. The affection of the sexes strongly resembles that of our school-children. It is sudden, capricious, superficial, and temporary, and sometimes violent, but rarely permanent, or would be rarely permanent were it not for the example of the whites, whose habitudes in these respects the imitative instincts of the negro impel him to copy after. In their native Africa, and without the influence and example of the superior race, polygamy is universal, the affection of the husband being a mere caprice in most cases, they sell their wives and children without compunction, but the mother, with that universal maternal instinct common to all human creatures, and to animals of the higher classes, clings tenaciously to her offspring, while perfectly willing to change husbands or owners, as they really are in fact. Many of the “rich men” of Africa are only so in the number of their wives and children, and they trade and traffic in this property as coolly and regularly as if they were legitimate subjects of commerce. Nevertheless, the natural law and the natural tendency of this people is to a single union, and probably a large majority of the native Africans have only one wife. There is no natural tendency to polygamy in any race, for the numbers of the sexes being equal, the natural impulse is to a single union. But their feeble and capricious affections lead to polygamy, and their incapacity to purchase or support wives is the only limit to the negro practice in these respects. Under the teachings and restraints of the superior race at the South, the negroes, male and female, are vastly elevated in this regard, as well as others above their African habitudes. They form sexual unions or marry essentially like the whites. The parties become intimate, an affection springs up, they ask and receive the consent of their masters, and they are married by a white clergyman or by a minister of their own people. Thus far, marriage among “slaves” is, on the surface at least, an exact copy of the marriage of whites. They ask the consent of their masters, as white persons ask the consent of their parents or guardians, and they are married with the