Side by side with the aristocrat, waiting deferentially to do his bidding, with a grace and courtliness hardly surpassed by his master, I place the negro servant of the Old South. If one figure was unique, the other is not less so. Either figure in the passing throng would quickly arrest your attention. I am frank to confess to a tender feeling for those faithful black servitors of the Old South—the “Uncle Remuses” and “Aunt Chloes” of picture and poetry. On the great plantations, in their picturesque colors, in constant laughter and good nature, well fed and clothed and generally well-kept and moderately worked, the negro of slavery lived his careless, heart-free life. The specter of hunger and want never disquieted him. His cabin, clothing, food, garden, pocket money, and holidays came without his concern. I think I state the truth when I say that for the millions of slaves of the Old South there were fewer heartaches than ever troubled a race of people. Freedom may be an inestimable boon. I know that poet and orator have so declared. But when I look upon the care-worn faces of the remnant of old-time negroes who have been testing freedom for a generation and have found it full of heartache and worry, I take exception to the much-vaunted doctrine of liberty as the panacea for all human ills. An old darky, with white head and shuffling feet and haunted look in his eyes, stopped the other day at the door of my office, and, after the manner of the old days, his cap in hand, asked “if massa could give the old nigger a dime?” Something in my voice or manner must have intimated to him that, like him, I belonged to the old order, as he said: “It’s all right for some folks, dis thing they calls freedom; but God knows I’d be glad to see the old days once more before I die.” Freedom to him, and to others like him, had proven a cheat and a snare. I have no word of apology or defense for slavery. Long ago I thanked God that it was no longer lawful for one human being to hold another in enforced servitude. But a generation or more of free negroes has been our most familiar object-lesson, and the outcome is painful at best. The negro who commands respect in the South to-day, as a rule, is the negro who was born and trained under slavery. The new generation, those who have known nothing but freedom, it is charity to say, are an unsatisfactory body of people generally. Whenever you find a negro whose education comes not from books and college only, but from the example and home teaching and training of his white master and mistress, you will generally find one who speaks the truth, is honest, self-respecting and self-restraining, docile and reverent, and always the friend of the Southern white gentleman and lady. Here and there in the homes of the New South these graduates from the school of slavery are to be found in the service of old families and their descendants, and the relationship is one of peculiar