The truth is that in Southern homes, the negro prospered and multiplied as no other laboring class has ever done. The South shared with him its bread, its medicines, its homes and its churches. M. de La Tours, the eminent French hygienist, truthfully said that "The slaves of the South were the best fed and the best cared for laborers that the world ever saw." No chain-gang, no penitentiary, for the negro, no lynchings, and no crimes to be lynched for, when the negro was under the influence of our mothers and grandmothers. God forgive the fanatic who in later days put folly in his head and the devil in his heart. Our mothers trusted him and he trusted them. All through the war, while nearly all the white men were away in the army, the negro slave was the protector and the support of Southern families. Our mothers would have died for the negroes, and negroes would have died for them. In Wilson's raid near Columbus, Ga., his soldiers were about to destroy a patch of cane belonging to a widow. The brave woman took her gun and declared she would shoot the first man that touched her property. In their rage they raised their rifles to shoot her down. Just then her old cook rushed in between them, saying, "If you are going to kill 'old miss,' you'll have to kill me, too." When Sherman was plundering South Carolina, some of his soldiers heard that a young lady had a very fine gold watch concealed in her bosom. They demanded it, and on her refusal they were about to seize her, when Delia, her faithful servant, defied them. "Fore God, buckra, if one of younner put your nasty hand on dis chile of my ole missus you got to knock Delia down fust." The monument to the Southern woman will be a monument to our faithful old Dinahs and Delias too. The old ex-slaves will gather at its base and as the tears stream down their dusky cheeks they will say, as they say now, "Dat's de best friend the poor nigger ever had," and enlightened negroes, like Booker Washington, will tell the true story that out of slavery the North got money, the South got ruin, and the negro got civilization, Christianity, and contentment.