idleness, vice and crime, as it has always failed, and if brutal punishments are next resorted to when milder ones have failed, one sickens at the prospect. Can Southern, abetted by Northern men strew the earth with the seeds of accursed slavery, bastardy and treason, secret conspiracy, callous, sneering fraud and the brutality of the mob, and think to stop by lynching the harvest of black duplicity, bred of fear, and black criminality, bred of misery and hate,—when they have gathered enough of the fruits to make an exhibit of Negro vice? The departure of lynching waits for two events: the breeding of the animal out the most wretched Negroes until they find greater satisfaction in something higher than sensuality and revenge; and the breeding of savage cruelty out of the white man until he can find pleasure in something more humane than torture by fire. As our counsellors bid us turn our attention to the dark side of our life, we bid them turn theirs from it. Your boasted civilization on its under side is but a progress from rape to adultery, from brute to devil. The savage honors the brute and tortures the devil; the civilized man tortures or crushes the brute and honors the devil. There is a pitcher plant of California, which is so described: Above a funnel shaped stem, it flaunts a crimson banner. The hood of the flower is transparent, so that the wary are caught even in their efforts to flee. From the mouth downwards the walls exude intoxicating sweets but multitudinous hairs, all pointing downward, lower the victim farther with every struggle. At its bottom a charnel heap, poisoning the air. Such plants flourish amidst civilization, and millions are their victims, who debauch their appetites until their intellects shrink to the size of their already shrunken consciences, and they are helpless to do anything but die. Liberty _is_ perilous, a very ’valley of the shadow of death,’ but the history of every nation which has lived and died teaches us that the danger of a false step is even greater near the end of the journey than at the beginning. Egypt, Assyria, Judea, Greece, Rome—the history of every nation is a light-house marking a _reef_ in the harbor of humanity. When Cain had killed Abel, he hid the body, and when God called, replied, "Am I my brother’s keeper?" A chill foreboding comes over us with these Northern doubts of the wisdom of Reconstruction, and we cannot refrain from wondering if the North still retains the sense of duty of 61; if the North can do, can even will to do justice. And here let us turn from our first question: What does justice to the Negro demand? To the second: What can the Negro do to get justice? My end has been reached if there is felt more than before the need of answering the latter question.