among us, which they will not purchase, when they are allowed the opportunity of labor and earning wages.  What a market the South would open under the new system!  It would set all the mills and workshops astir.  Four millions of people would become purchasers of all the various articles of manufacture and commerce, in place of the few coarse, simple necessaries, laid in for them in gross by the planters.  Here is the solution of the vexed industrial question.  The indisposition to labor is overcome in a healthy nature by instincts and motives of superior force, such as the love of life, the desire to be well clothed and fed, the sense of security derived from provision for the future, the feeling of self-respect, the love of family and children, and the convictions of duty.  These all exist in the negro, in a state of greater or less development.  To give one or two examples.  One man brought Captain Hooper seventy dollars in silver, to keep for him, which he had obtained from selling pigs and chickens,—­thus providing for the future.  Soldiers of Colonel Higginson’s regiment, having confidence in the same officer, intrusted him, when they were paid off, with seven hundred dollars, to be transmitted by him to their wives, and this besides what they had sent home in other ways,—­showing the family-feeling to be active and strong in them.  They have also the social and religious inspirations to labor.  Thus, early in our occupation of Hilton Head, they took up, of their own accord, a collection to pay for the candles for their evening meetings, feeling that it was not right for the Government longer to provide them.  The result was a contribution of two dollars and forty-eight cents.  They had just fled from their masters, and had received only a small pittance of wages, and this little sum was not unlike the two mites which the widow cast into the treasury.  Another collection was taken, last June, in the church on St. Helena Island, upon the suggestion of the pastor that they should share in the expenses of worship.  Fifty-two dollars was the result,—­not a bad collection for some of our Northern churches.  I have seen these people where they are said to be lowest, and sad indeed are some features of their lot, yet with all earnestness and confidence I enter my protest against the wicked satire of Carlyle.

Is there not here some solution of the question of prejudice or caste which has troubled so many good minds?  When these people can no longer be used as slaves, men will try to see how they can make the most out of them as freemen.  Your Irishman, who now works as a day-laborer, honestly thinks that he hates the negro; but when the war is over, he will have no objection to going South and selling him groceries and household-implements at fifty per cent. advance on New-York prices, or to hiring him to raise cotton for twenty-five or fifty cents a day.  Our prejudices, under any reasonable adjustment of the social system, readily accommodate themselves to our interests, even without much aid from the moral sentiments.