strongest, and it may be said to be the only enduring affection of the negro nature, for it remains an ever-present feeling long after the feeble and capricious “family sentiment,” or love of wife and offspring, is entirely obliterated from his memory. Marriage of “Southern slaves” thus briefly presented, will be seen to be as real, decent, orderly, and natural, as the nature of the negro admits of, or relatively speaking, as the Almighty Creator himself has designed or decreed. _He_ has endowed the negro with different and vastly subordinate moral wants and affections, but at the same time given him an imitative capacity that enables him to copy the higher nature and more exalted habitudes of the superior race. They therefore marry as white people marry, with the same forms and the same ceremonies, and such a thing as polygamy, or what the “Abolitionist” calls concubinage, is utterly unknown among these people. They are no portion or part of society, have no place in the social compact, they are unable to fulfil its duties, and therefore have none of its rights, hence legal marriage is obviously absurd and impossible. To the ignorant Abolition writer it may seem quite plain that marriage should be a civil contract with negroes as well as white people, for his theory that the negro is a _black_ Caucasian, neutralizes all difficulties in this as in other things. But even they must see that to force them on the same social level in this vital respect must necessarily involve social equality in all other respects—a result, unless their theory be sound, obviously unnatural, monstrous, and wicked. The negro, isolated in his native Africa, is at this moment exactly what he was four thousand years ago, selling his wives and offspring with as utter disregard of marital relations, and unconsciousness of a family sentiment, as in the time of the Pharaohs; and when we contrast these things—the universal polygamy, the trade in wives, the caprice and savagism of the lawless husband or master with the decent and Christian marriage of “Southern slaves,” imitated from the superior race, and generally restrained by its example, may we not say with entire reverence and truth, that marriage, as it now actually exists among these people at the South, being all that their natures are capable of, and all that their wants and their highest happiness demand, is also, and of necessity, all that God Himself has decreed or designed in respect to this race? There is no other comparison to make, or contrast to present, but that of African savagism; for that modern product of a world-wide delusion, “freedom,” or free negroism, as shown elsewhere, is a social abnormalism, a diseased condition, that necessarily ends in extinction; and unless it can be proven that disease is preferable to health, and death itself a greater good than life, no argument or proof drawn from it is legitimate or allowable.