The old gentleman talked on during the intervals of greetings and ended by inviting young Harding to his home, where a lawn party was to be held that night. As the volume of general applause lessened, the cry of “Holmes! Holmes!” was kept up with an insistence which might have induced a less capable man to respond. Nor would the enthused throng be quieted until John Holmes mounted the platform. “It had not been my purpose, ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “to address you to-day upon the subject touched upon by Mr. Harding, but, since he has modestly lectured us on our barbarity, I must say a word in defense of the South and southerners. He intimates that the curse of slavery still rests upon the southern states. I wonder if Mr. Harding knows whether or not the curse of slave-trade, which to be accurate is called ‘the sum of all villainies,’ really rests upon Great Britain, who was the originator of the inhuman system and not upon us southerners? “The most careful statistics show that in the beginning over 19,000,000 Africans were imported into the British West Indies and so severely were they dealt with that when emancipation came, only a little over 600,000 were left to benefit by it. The slave trade was fastened on the American colonies by the greed of English kings, who, over and over again, vetoed the restrictive legislation of the Colonial Assemblies on the ground that it interfered with the just profits of their sea-faring subjects. Is there no work for Nemesis here? “That the system of slavery, as it existed in the southern states, was accompanied by many cases of hardship and cruelty, we freely admit; that its abolition is a proper ground for sincere rejoicing, we do not hesitate to affirm. But, it is nevertheless true, that, looked at in a large way, slavery was a lifting force to the negro race during the whole period of its existence here. The proof lies just here--when the war of emancipation came, the 4,000,000 negroes in the southern states stood on a higher level of civilization than did any other equal number of people of the same race anywhere on the globe. “As to the mental and moral advancement of the negro, we have not done enough to render us boastful or self-satisfied, but enough to dull the shafts of the mistaken or malicious who would convict us of heathenish indifference to his elevation. We have from childhood had a lively appreciation of the debt we owe to the race. Nobody owes them as much as we do; nobody knows them as well; nobody’s future is so involved in their destiny as our own. Is it not natural that we should help them in their pathetic struggle against poverty, ignorance and degradation?