world! Not that he should eat pumpkin with never such felicity in the West-India Islands is, or can be, the blessedness of our Black friend; but that he should do useful work there, according as the gifts have been bestowed on him for that. And his own happiness, and that of others round him, will alone be possible by his and their getting into such a relation that this can be permitted him, and in case of need, that this can be compelled him. I beg you to understand this; for you seem to have a little forgotten it, and there lie a thousand inferences in it, not quite useless for Exeter Hall, at present. The idle Black man in the West Indies had, not long since, the right, and will again under better form, if it please Heaven, have the right (actually the first “right of man" for an indolen+ person) to be compelled to work as he was fit, and to do the Maker's will who had constructed him with such and such capabilities, and prefigurements of capability. And I incessantly pray Heaven, all men, the whitest alike and the blackest, the richest and the poorest, in other regions of the world, had attained precisely the same right, the divine right of being compelled (if "permitted" will not answer) to do what work they are appointed for, and not to go idle another minute, in a life which is so short, and where idleness so soon runs to putrescence! Alas, we had then a perfect world; and the Millennium, and true " Organisation of Labour," and reign of complete blessedness, for all workers and men, had then arrived,—which in these our own poor districts of the Planet, as we all lament to know, it is very far from having yet done. [More withdrawals; but the rest sitting with increased attention.]

Do I, then, hate the Negro? No; except when the soul is killed out of him, I decidedly like poor Quashee; and find him a pretty kind of man. With a pennyworth of oil, you can make a handsome glossy thing of Quashee, when the soul is not killed in him! A swift, supple fellow; a merry-hearted, grinning, dancing, singing, affectionate kind of creature, with a great deal of melody and amenability in his composition. This certainly. is a notable fact: The black African, alone of wild-men, can live among men civilised. While all manner of Caribs and others pine into annihilation in presence of the pale faces, he contrives to continue; does not die of sullen irreconcilable rage,

of rum, of brutish laziness and darkness, and fated incompatibility with his new place; but lives and multiplies, and evidently means to abide among us, if we can find the right regulation for him. We shall have to find it; we are now engaged in the search; and have at least discovered that of two methods, the old Demerara method, and the new Demerara method, neither will answer.

Alas, my friends, I understand well your rage against the poor Negro's slavery; what said rage proceeds from; and have a perfect sympathy with it, and even know it by experience. Can the oppressor of my black fellow-man be of any use to me in particular? Am I gratified in my mind by the ill-usage of any two- or four-legged thing; of any horse or any dog? Not so, I assure you. In me too the natural sources of human rage exist more or less, and the capability of flying out into “fiery wrath against oppression," and of signing petitions; both of which things can be done very cheap. Good heavens, if signing petitions would do it, if hopping to Rome on one leg would do it, think you it were long undone!

Frightful things are continually told us of Negro slavery, of the hardships, bodily and spiritual, suffered by slaves. Much exaggerated, and mere exceptional cases, say the opponents. Exceptional cases, I answer; yes, and universal ones! On the whole, hardships, and even oppressions and injustices are not unknown in this world; I myself have suffered such, and have not you? It is said, Man, of whatever colour, is born to such, even as the sparks fly upwards. For in fact labour, and this is properly what we call hardship, misery, &c. (meaning mere ugly labour not yet done), labour is not joyous but grievous; and we have a good deal of it to do among us here. We have, simply, to carry the whole world and its businesses upon our backs, we poor united Human Species; to carry it, and shove it forward, from day to day, somehow or other, among us, or else be ground to powder under it, one and all. No light task, let me tell you, even if each did his part honestly, which each doesn't by any means. No, only the noble lift willingly with their whole strength, at the general burden; and in such a crowd, after all your drillings, regulatings, and attempts at equitable distribution, and compulsion, what deceptions are still practicable, what errors are inevitable! Many cunning

ignoble fellows shirk the labour altogether; and instead of faithfully lifting at the immeasurable universal handbarrow with its thousand-million handles, contrive to get on some ledge of it, and be lifted!

What a story we have heard about all that, not from vague rumour since yesterday, but from inspired prophets, speakers. and seers, ever since speech began! How the giant willing spirit, among white masters, and in the best-regulated families, is so often not loaded only but overloaded, crushed-down like an Enceladus; and, all his life, has to have armies of pigmies building tabernacles on his chest; marching composedly over his neck, as if it were a highway; and much amazed if, when they run their straw spear into his nostril, he is betrayed into sudden sneezing, and oversets some of them. [Some laughter, the speaker himself looking terribly serious.] My friends, I have come to the sad conclusion that SLAVERY, whether established by law, or by law abrogated, exists very extensively in this world, in and out of the West Indies; and, in fact, that you cannot abolish slavery by act of parliament, but can only abolish the name of it, which is very little!

In the West Indies itself, if you chance to abolish Slavery to Men, and in return establish Slavery to the Devil (as we see in Demerara), what good is it? To save men's bodies, and fill them with pumpkins and rum, is a poor task for human benevolence, if you have to kill their soul, what soul there was, in the business! Slavery is not so easy to be abolished; it will long continue, in spite of acts of parliament. And shall I tell you which is the one intolerable sort of slavery; the slavery over which the very gods weep? That sort is not rifest in the West Indies; but, with all its sad fruits, prevails in nobler countries. It is the slavery of the strong to the weak; of the great and noble-minded to the small and mean! The slavery of Wisdom to Folly. When Folly all "emancipated," and become supreme, armed with ballot-boxes, universal suffrages, and appealing to what Dismal Sciences, Statistics, Constitutional Philosophies, and other Fool Gospels it has got devised for itself, can say to Wisdom: "Be silent, or thou shalt repent it! Suppress thyself, I advise thee; canst thou not contrive to cease, then?" That also, in some anarchic-constitutional epochs, has been seen. When, of high and noble objects, there re

mained, in the market-place of human things, at length none; and he that could not make guineas his pursuit, and the applause of flunkies his reward, found himself in such a minority as seldom was before.

Minority, I know, there always was: but there are degrees of it, down to minority of one,-down to suppression of the unfortunate minority, and reducing it to zero, that the flunkyworld may have peace from it henceforth. The flunky-world has peace; and descends, manipulating its ballot-boxes, Coppock suffrages, and divine constitutional apparatus; quoting its Dismal Sciences, Statistics, and other satisfactory Gospels and Talmuds,-into the throat of the Devil; not bothered by the importunate minority on the road. Did you never hear of "Crucify him! Crucify him!" That was a considerable feat in the suppressing of minorities; and is still talked-of on Sundays, -with very little understanding, when I last heard of it. My friends, my friends, I fear we are a stupid people; and stuffed with such delusions, above all with such immense hypocrisies and self-delusions, from our birth upwards, as no people were before; God help us!-Emancipated? Yes, indeed, we are emancipated out of several things, and into several things. No man, wise or foolish, any longer can control you for good or for evil. Foolish Tomkins, foolish Jobson, cannot now singly oppress you: but if the Universal Company of the Tomkinses and Jobsons, as by law established, can more than ever? If, on all highways and byways, that lead to other than a Tomkins-Jobson winning-post, you meet, at the second step, the big, dumb, universal genius of Chaos, and are so placidly yet peremptorily taught, "Halt here!" There is properly but one slavery in the world. One slavery, in which all other slaveries and miseries that afflict the earth are included; compared with which the worst West-Indian, white, or black, or yellow slave. ries are a small matter. One slavery over which the very gods weep. Other slaveries, women and children and stump-orators weep over; but this is for men and gods! [Sensation; some, however, took snuff.]

If precisely the Wisest Man were at the top of society, and the next-wisest next, and so on till we reached the Demerara Nigger (from whom downwards, through the horse, &c., there is no question hitherto), then were this a perfect world, the ex

treme maximum of wisdom produced in it. That is how you might produce your maximum, would some god assist. And I can tell you also how the minimum were producible. Let no man in particular be put at the top; let all men be accounted equally wise and worthy, and the notion get abroad that anybody or nobody will do well enough at the top; that money (to which may be added success in stump-oratory) is the real symbol of wisdom, and supply-and-demand the all-sufficient substitute for command and obedience among two-legged animals of the unfeathered class: accomplish all those remarkable convictions in your thinking department; and then in your practical, as is fit, decide by count of heads, the vote of a Demerara Nigger equal and no more to that of a Chancellor Bacon: this, I perceive, will (so soon as it is fairly under way, and all obstructions left behind) give the minimum of wisdom in your proceedings. Thus were your minimum producible,—with no God needed to assist, nor any Demon even, except the general Demon of Ignavia (Unvalour), lazy Indifference to the production or non-production of such things, which runs in our own blood. Were it beautiful, think you? Folly in such millionfold majority, at length peaceably supreme in this earth. Advancing on you as the huge buffalo-phalanx does in the Western Deserts; or as, on a smaller scale, those bristly creatures did in the Country of the Gadarenes. Rushing, namely, in wild stampede (the Devil being in them, some small fly having stung them), boundless,-one wing on that edge of your horizon, the other wing on that, and rearward whole tides and oceans of them:-so could Folly rush; the enlightened public one huge Gadarenes-swinery, tail cocked, snout in air, with joyful animating short squeak; fast and ever faster; down steep places, -to the sea of Tiberias, and the bottomless cloacas of Nature: quenched there, since nowhere sooner. My friends, such sight is too sublime, if you are out in it, and are not of it!—

Well, except by Mastership and Servantship, there is no conceivable deliverance from Tyranny and Slavery. Cosmos is not Chaos, simply by this one quality, That it is governed. Where wisdom, even approximately, can contrive to govern, all is right, or is ever striving to become so; where folly is "emancipated," and gets to govern, as it soon will, all is wrong.