It may be charged that as a slave he never had an opportunity to give his faculties that exercise which is necessary to their development. But the answer is complete. He has not been a slave in all places, at all times. In Africa he was not a slave, save to himself and his own instincts; in Rome he was no more a slave than was the Teuton, the Greek, or the Gaul; in New England he has not been a slave for over a hundred years, and may be assumed to have had there as much encouragement, and to have received as sustaining an influence as will ever be accorded him by the White. What has been the result even in New England? Dr. Henry M. Field a few years since wrote a book of travels in the South with his reflections thereon. Dr. Field comes of a distinguished Northern family, of which the whole country is proud. He is a close observer, a fair recorder, and the friend of the whole human race. He will not be accused of prejudice. Speaking of the present intellectual condition of the Negro in Massachusetts, he says: “Yet here we are doomed to great disappointment. The black man has had every right that belongs to his white neighbor; not only the natural rights which, according to the Declaration of Independence, belong to every human being—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—but the right to vote, and to have a part in making the laws. He could own his little home, and there sit under his own vine and fig-tree with none to molest or make him afraid. His children could go to the same common schools, and sit on the same benches, and learn the same lessons as white children. “With such advantages, a race that had natural genius ought to have made great progress in a hundred years. But where are the men that it should have produced to be the leaders of their people? We find not one who has taken rank as a man of action or a man of thought; as a thinker or a writer; as artist or poet; as discoverer or inventor. The whole race has remained on one dead level of mediocrity. “If any man ever proved himself a friend of the African race it was Theodore Parker, who endured all sorts of persecution and social ostracism, who faced mobs and was hissed and hooted in public meetings, for his bold championship of the rights of the Negro race. But rights are one thing, and capacity is another. And while he was ready to fight for them he was very despondent as to their capacity for rising in the scale of civilization. Indeed, he said in so many words: ‘In respect to the power of civilization, the African is at the bottom, the American Indian next.’ In 1857 he wrote to a friend: ‘There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble relation to the rest of men and always will. In two generations what a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in New England. But in twenty generations the Negroes will stand just where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared.’