Who could have foreseen that in the first century of our existence African freedmen would rule sovereign commonwealths, and become the judges of the rights and property of a race who had ruled the destinies of the world since governments--patriarchal, monarchical or constitutional--was known to man? The true, sincere and rational humanitarian looks with sorrow upon the future state of the misguided negroes; for when this institutional age shall have passed away, he sees the exodus or extirpation of this disturbing element in the social and political conditions of the more powerful sovereign race. The authors of the infamous policy have written their _hic jacet_ against our civilization. No where can there be found in the history of any country where the civil and military policy have been so basely prostituted, or where the safeguards of liberty, life and property were ever entrusted to freed slaves--human chattels; slaves who never for a moment have been in a state of pupilage. It is an epoch that marks the decadence of the manhood and civilization of a great nation--homogeneous, prosperous, enlightened and happy. The nearest approximation to this era of ruin--of social degradation--was when the slaves in Rome were enfranchised by order of the emperor, and conditions there were totally dissimilar. Whilst they enjoyed certain rights and prerogatives of manumission, they were still held to duties of obedience and gratitude. Whatever were the fruits of their toil and industry, their patrons shared or inherited the third part, or even the whole of their acquisitions. In the decline of this great empire, the proud mistress of the world, we are told that hereditary distinctions were gradually abolished, and the reason or instinct of Justinian completed the simple form of an absolute monarchy. In the eye of the law all Romans were equal and all subjects were citizens. The inestimable character was degraded to an obsolete and empty name. The voice of a Roman could no longer enact laws or create the annual ministers of his power. "It may take many generations perhaps, for moral changes are slow, to put out all our lights of knowledge that are now beaming from every cottage in the South; but one after another they will be extinguished, and with them the beacon torch of liberty. When the white men of the South shall come to see how things are, and to realize the downward tendency, physical, intellectual manhood will make a throe to regain the height it has lost, and if it fails, a storm will arise from the elements they are compounding, that will break somewhere and spend itself with desolating fury. They cannot degrade a people who have been enlightened and free, prosperous and happy, without igniting a mass which they can no more control, than they can the central fires of Vesuvius.