The poet misunderstood the "broken chains" as greatly as he did the "burial hour." Chains were broken, but their breaking was no blessing to the negro. Golden chains of domestic ties, drawing him gently, kindly, surely up to higher morality and complete manhood--these were broken; and far other were forged for him, with which fear he has been made fast to destruction. His only friends able to help alienated; what a clog! Given back to African improgressiveness; what a fetter! How he is held to the body of death by unbreakable chains of want, misery, vice, disease, and utter helplessness! and how his shackles gall him and his convict chains clank in every corner of the land which was once an earthly paradise to him! Let us not sully with Whittier the glory of the federal arms by ascribing to them as their chief triumph the gift of illusory freedom to a few negroes. Rather let us inform ourselves with the spirit of Webster, and give praise and thanks without end for the actual blessings and the richer promise of the restored union to myriads of that race whose mission it is to spread an inexpressibly fair socialism over all the earth. And let me say at the last, the people of the north should learn that all the tragic evils which Professor Wendell and others outside of the south have in mind belong only to the slave-ships, and by a strange psychological metastasis--no stranger, however, than that by which the fourth commandment, in popular conception, has been abrogated as to the seventh day, and applied to the first day of the week--they have firmly attached themselves to the reputation of southern slavery. For long years we of the south, our mothers and our mothers' mothers, our fathers and our fathers' fathers, have been charged with cruelties and outrages purely fancied. These fabrications are the stock comparisons with which almost every invective against the wrongs of any lower class is sharpened. The writer or speaker whenever he is taken short says something of the dreadful condition of the southern slave under the sway of an entirely absolute master. Variety of the misdeeds invoked as illustration is limited only by the promptness with which the utterer can think of what he has read in abolition literature or its sequel. It is all mere parrot gabble. To hear so much of it as we do is "a little wearing," as Reginald Wilfer said. Surely if our brothers and sisters of the north but think, they will acknowledge that these so-called horrors of slavery were all nothing but the inventions of the angry passions provoked by the powers in the unseen after they had decided that slavery must be sacrificed in the interests of the union. And these dear brothers and sisters will no longer persist in asserting that southern slavery was but robbery and oppression of and cruelty to the slave; that the system was evil to him of itself. They will talk no more of the pro-slavery infamy, of the unscrupulousness