Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it abnormally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death. It certainly cannot be said of the African Boer that he continued to maintain this institution when he had reached a higher stage of development than that at which other European nations have forsaken it. Though in point of time he maintained it later than some, yet it cannot be asserted by any one who has considered the matter that it was more at variance with his intellectual and emotional standpoint, and therefore more immoral, that the African Boer should have kept slaves in South Africa seventy years ago than that the Greek of the time of Pericles, or the Roman of Cicero's day, should have done so. And it certainly was far less at discord with his intellectual and moral condition than with that of the highly-cultured and enlightened Anglo-Saxons who in America and Jamaica have continued to support and fight for the institution within the memory of this generation. In truth, we must allow that the full-fledged institution was less at discord with the moral and intellectual condition of the Boer than are to-day at variance with our own those lineal descendants of slavery, the disabilities attaching to sex or class, which in our most civilized societies still exist. It is then not surprising, though much to be regretted, that two hundred years ago the Boer sought to become, and did become, a slave-holder. If it be asked, "Was slavery, as carried out at the Cape, of a more or less vindictive nature than as carried on among other civilized nations?" the reply can only be that slavery among civilized folk is a disease so monotonous in its symptoms that whether we study its story as inlaid on the mud tablets of ruined Chaldean cities, or as described in Greek or Roman literature, or view its image in such stone picture as that which Sennacherib, King of Assyria, caused to be made (and which to-day hangs on the walls of the British Museum for him who wills to see); or whether, on the other hand, we examine it as described in the nineteenth-century novel, or sit in the evening beside the old Boer grandmother, as, with her feet on her stove, she describes the remembrance of her far-off youth--the story is one, and its details monotonously unvarying.