Your soul burns within you as you read of these deeds that took place in Jerusalem; your heart aches for them who wandered about tormented, hunted down on every side; you lavish your sympathy upon them; but then you think it wuz a savage age, this wuz one of its brutalities, and you congratulate yourself upon livin’ in an age of Christian enlightenment. [Illustration: DEFENDING HIS HOME.] You think such deeds are impossible in a land over which the Star of Bethlehem has shone for eighteen hundred years. Down in many a Southern bayou, in the depths of many a cypress swamp, near the remains of a violated home, lies a heap of ashes—all that remains of a man who died fightin’ for his home and his loved ones. That wuz his only crime—he expiated it with his life. But his liberated soul soared upwards jest as joyfully, let us hope, as if his body received the full sacrament of sorrowful respect. One of the laws enacted of late in the South permits a white man to kill a black man for a crime committed aginst his honor, and if the white man commits the same crime and the black man takes the same revenge, he is killed at once accordin’ to law—one man liberated with rejoicings, the other shot down like a dog. Do you say the black man is more ignorant? That is a bad plea. And wantin’ to act dretful lawful, a short time ago a gang of white law-makers dug up the dead body of a dark-complexioned husband they had murdered accordin’ to law, and after breakin’ its bones, hung it over agin. He could find in the law no help to defend his home or protect his honor, no refuge in the grave to which the law had sent him. I wonder if his freed soul has found some little safe corner in space fenced round by justice and compassion, where it can hide itself forever from the laws and civilization of this 19th Century, in this great and glorious country of the free. To select this one instance of cruel wrong and injustice from the innumerable ones similar to it is like takin’ up a grain of sand from the seashore and contemplatin’ it—the broad seashore that stretches out on either hand is full of them. And why should not wrongs, and crimes, and woes be inevitable—why, indeed? A race but lately slaves, with the responsible gift of freedom dropped too soon into their weak hands— The race so lately the dominant and all-powerful one through the nation, by the fiction of law dropped down under the legal rule of these so long down-trodden, oppressed, ignorant masses, what could the result be? And the law-makers who had proclaimed peace and liberty, on paper, sot afar contemplatin’ the great work they had done, and left the Reign of Horror to be enacted by the victors and the victims. Poor colored man! poor white man! both to be pitied with a pity beyend words. It wuz not their fault, it wuz but the fallin’ hail and lightnin’ and tempest out of clouds that had been gatherin’ for ages.