This system was assumed to be especially happy for the slave; witness a recent Southern writer: "Hence, to the negro, the institution of slavery, so far from being prejudicial, was actually beneficial in its effects, in that, as a strictly paternal form of government, it furnished that combination of wise control and kind compulsion which is absolutely essential to his development and well-being." Minor, in his recent "The Real Lincoln," urges that "the children of slaveholders may be saved from being betrayed into the error of regarding with reprobation the conduct of their parents in holding slaves"; and justifies slavery on the ground that the slaves had "a more liberal supply of the necessaries of life than was ever granted to any other laboring class in any other place, or other age." Reed, in his "Brothers' War," holds that "Any and every evil of southern slavery to the negro was accidental.... Slavery, so far from being wrong morally, was righteousness, justice, and mercy to the slave." No wonder that "Nicholas Worth" exclaims: "What I discovered was that the people did not know their own history; that they had accepted certain oft-repeated expressions about it as facts; and that the practical denial of free discussion of certain subjects had deadened research and even curiosity to know the truth." This theory that slavery was harmful, if harmful at all, only to the white race, has gone to the extent of insisting that slavery was educational; thus Thomas Nelson Page says that at the end of the War, among the able-bodied Negroes there was "scarcely an adult who was not a trained laborer or a skilled artisan. In the cotton section they knew how to raise and prepare cotton; in the sugar belt they knew how to grow and grind sugar; in the tobacco, corn, wheat, and hay belts they knew how to raise and prepare for market those crops. They were the shepherds, cattle-men, horse-trainers and raisers. The entire industrial work of the South was performed by them.... Nearly all the houses in the South were built by them. They manufactured most of the articles that were manufactured in the South." And Mrs. Avary, in her "Dixie After the War," thinks that "the typical Southern plantation was, in effect, a great social settlement for the uplift of Africans." These arguments are perhaps not intended to suggest that the present free laboring population would be better off if reduced to slavery; but they fix upon the present generation the unhappy task of justifying all the mistakes of previous generations.