I do not dispute that her opportunity of learning southern slavery, small as it was, was very far superior to that of the other prominent abolitionists except Seward, who had taught school in the black belt of Georgia.[84] I maintain that she knew but little of southern slavery, and they less; that what both they and she conscientiously and most confidently believed to be their knowledge of this slavery, the slave, and of the slaveholder, was but a prodigious mass of delusion and prejudice. I shall show, I think, that, instead of observing, she merely fancied and imagined, and that, to say the least, it is very misleading to allege that this fancying and imagining of hers was done "on the spot." By the words, "all the tragic evils of slavery," Professor Wendell evidently means that the evils of southern slavery to the slave were both very many and very great. I shall show, I believe, that the condition of the average negro in southern slavery was far better than it was in Africa whence he came, and far better than it is now since he has been freed. There are occasionally incident to every human condition--even to the relation of parent and child--some tragic evils of its own. In the native home of the negro in West Africa all the women and nearly all the men are slaves of brutally cruel savages, without any protection of law whatever. The social organism is in the very lowest stage; and there is complete inability to evolve into a better one as the stationariness of ages proves. In the new south, certain causes which I have described at length in the last two chapters of this book have, ever since emancipation, been steadily and with acceleration depressing the average negro; and the rise of the few who have managed to acquire some property, or to get a good industrial education, only brings out more conspicuously the misery and wretchedness of the mass. It is correct to say that there was a vast multitude of tragic evils to the negroes in West Africa; and it is also correct to say that there is now the same to them in the south; but it is not correct to say that the tragic evils of southern slavery to the slave were frequent or general. The truth as to southern slavery ought to be known everywhere, which is, that it raised the negro very greatly in condition, and, now that he has been taken out of it, his progress has been arrested, and he is relapsing.