They do not consider that large numbers of this class held positions of responsibility and trust, which they discharged with a fidelity and success that is the strongest proof of the potentiality of the race. They do not reckon that warm friendship which existed between master and servant, and which more than any other one thing gives promise of future and abiding friendship between the races when left to settle their relations without outside interference. One going through the South now—even through those parts where the old-time darky was once the regular and ordinary picture—unless he should happen to drift into some secluded region so far out of the sweep of the current that its life has been caught as in an eddy, would never know what the old life had been, and what the old-time Negroes were in that life. Their memory is still cherished in the hearts of those to whom they stood in a relation which cannot be explained to and cannot be understood by those who did not know it as a vital part of their home-life. Even these will soon have passed from the stage, and in another decade or two the story of that relation, whose roots were struck deep in the sacredest relations of life, will be only a tradition kept alive for a generation or two, but gradually fading until it is quite blurred out by time. Curiously, whatever the Southerners may think of slavery—and there were many who reprobated its existence—whatever they may think of “the Negro” of to-day, there is scarcely one who knew the Negro in his old relation who does not speak of him with sympathy and think of him with tenderness. The writer has known men begin to discuss new conditions fiercely, and on falling to talking of the past, drift into reminiscences of old servants and turn away to wipe their eyes. And not the least part of the bitterness of the South over the Negro question as it has existed grows out of resentment at the destruction of what was once a relation of warm friendship and tender sympathy. Of African slavery it may be said that whatever its merits and demerits, it divided this country into two sections, with opposing interests, and finally plunged it into a vast and terrible war. This is condemnation enough. One need not be an advocate of slavery because he upsets ideas that have no foundation whatever in truth and sets forth facts that can be substantiated by the experience of thousands who knew them at first hand. II It is well known by those who knew the old plantation-life that there were marked divisions between the Negroes. There were among them what might almost be termed different orders. These were graded by the various relations in which the individuals stood to the “white folks”—that is, to the master and mistress and their family.