She touches repeatedly on the social restrictions on free speech; thus, speaking of two gentlemen, one a clergyman: "They seem good and kind and amiable men, and I have no doubt are conscientious in their capacity of slave holders; but to one who has lived outside this dreadful atmosphere, the whole tone of their discourse has a morally muffled sound which one must hear to be able to conceive." She observes that whenever she discusses slavery with people she meets, they waive the abstract right or wrong of the system. Now and then she gets a bit of entire frankness, as when a very distinguished South Carolinian says to her, "I'll tell you why abolition is impossible; because every healthy negro can fetch $1000 in Charleston market at this moment." She generalizes as to the effects of emancipation in a way which later events completely justified. Unlike the West Indies, she says, the South is not tropical, and will not yield food without labor, and necessity would compel the liberated blacks to work. That they would not work, and the ground would lie idle, was, as we know, the bogy which was held up to scare away from emancipation--just as in our own day the danger of race mixture is made a bogy to scare away from social justice. But the event proved that Fanny Kemble was right in her predictions, in which indeed she was at one with other candid observers at the time. As to gradual emancipation, she believed it unwise--the system, she writes, is too absolutely bad for slow measures. Had she owned her husband's plantation, she would at once have freed the slaves, and hired them, if only as a means of financial salvation. She pronounces _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ to be no exaggeration. Her own story of facts gives a darker impression than Mrs. Stowe's novel. It may be asked, why, at this distance, revive the tragic tale? The answer is, that the truth of history is precious, and our present problems cannot be understood if we shut our eyes to their antecedents. Just now there is a fashion, among many Southern writers on the negro question, of beginning their story with the wrongs and sufferings of the reconstruction period. Now, it was indeed deplorable, and a thing not to be forgotten, that ignorant negroes sat in the Senate chambers of South Carolina and Mississippi, that taxes were excessive, and the public business mismanaged. But, in the broad view, it is well to remember that a few years earlier very much worse things than these were happening, and that a system which made cattle of men and women might be expected to avenge itself.