me a pair of mules.  He had a constable and twenty-five men with guns to back him.”  Another:  “Last year, after settling with my landlord, my share was four bales of cotton.  I shipped it to Richardson and May, 38 and 40 Perdido Street, New Orleans, through W.E.  Ringo & Co., merchants, at Mound Landing, Miss.  I lived four miles back of this landing.  I received from Ringo a ticket showing that my cotton was sold at nine and three-eighths cents, but I could never get a settlement.  He kept putting me off by saying that the bill of lading had not come.  Those bales averaged over four hundred pounds.  I did not owe him over twenty-five dollars.  A man may work there from Monday morning to Saturday night, and be as economical as he pleases, and he will come out in debt.  I am a close man, and I work hard.  I want to be honest in getting through the world.  I came away and left a crop of corn and cotton growing up.  I left it because I did not want to work twelve months for nothing.  I have been trying it for fifteen years, thinking every year that it would get better, and it gets worse.”  Said still another:  “I learned about Kansas from the newspapers that I got hold of.  They were Southern papers.  I got a map, and found out where Kansas was; and I got a History of the United States, and read about it.”

[Footnote 1:  See Negro Exodus (Report of Colonel Frank H. Fletcher).]

Query:  Was it genuine statesmanship that permitted these people to feel that they must leave the South?

* * * * *

5. A Postscript on the War and Reconstruction

Of all of the stories of these epoch-making years we have chosen one—­an idyl of a woman with an alabaster box, of one who had a clear conception of the human problem presented and who gave her life in the endeavor to meet it.

In the fall of 1862 a young woman who was destined to be a great missionary entered the Seminary at Rockford, Illinois.  There was little to distinguish her from the other students except that she was very plainly dressed and seemed forced to spend most of her spare time at work.  Yes, there was one other difference.  She was older than most of the girls—­already thirty, and rich in experience.  When not yet fifteen she had taught a country school in Pennsylvania.  At twenty she was considered capable of managing an unusually turbulent crowd of boys and girls.  When she was twenty-seven her father died, leaving upon her very largely the care of her mother.  At twenty-eight she already looked back upon fourteen years as a teacher, upon some work for Christ incidentally accomplished, but also upon a fading youth of wasted hopes and unfulfilled desires.