*See Sewell's "West Indies, or the Ordeal of Free Labor in the British West India Islands," an evidently dispassionate and disinterested view of the condition of these islands. An attentive consideration of his stateements would go far to relieve the matter of emancipation of some of the difficulties with which to many it seems environed. "These people," he remarks, "who live comfortably and independently, own houses and stock, pay taxes and poll votes, and pay their money to build churches, are the same people whom we have heard represented as idle, worthless, fellows, obstinately opposed to work, and ready to live on an orange or banana, rather than earn their daily bread." Together with this plastic docility, the African has another which at first sight seems in flagrant contradiction;--the race has a peculiar power of resistance permanence. It is said, probably truthfully, that no race has ever been able to abide a close contact with the Anglo-Saxon. One of two results has always followed;--either it has been swallowed up and lost as a river in an ocean, or it has gone down and been swept away. But this race has neither been absorbed nor destroyed. It has grown under the most adverse influences, and asserts itself in all its peculiar characteristics under foreign skies, and after the lapse of two centuries. The negro of America is a true African still. This race has not greatly mingled with other races. It is, we are inclined to believe, rather a characteristic of it not to seek an amalgamation with another people, its tendency is to remain apart. We are well aware, indeed, that this is exactly contrary to the views of many who have built their opinions on popular assertions and prejudice rather than on observed facts. The assumption is that the negro desires to mingle his blood with that of the white races. The reverse is the fact. There is, though it may seem to some unaccountable, a certain pride of race, which leads the negro to exult in the purity of his blood, and to regard a foreign element in it as not only not desirable, but even objectionable. This feeling does not belong simply to the negro on his own continent; it perpetuates, perhaps magnifies itself when surrounded by another people. Among them in this country a pure-blooded negro will, with biting sarcasm, taunt the mulatto with the fact that the blood of another race is in his veins.