“...  It is truly horrible to reduce human beings to the condition of cattle, to breed them, to sell them, and otherwise dispose of them, as cattle.  But is it defending such practices to say that the South does none of these things, but that on the contrary, both in theory and in practice, she treats the negro as a fellow-creature, with a soul to be saved, with feelings to be respected, though in the social order in a subordinate place, and of an intellectual organization which requires guardianship with mutual duties and obligations?  This system is called slavery, because it developed itself out of an older and very different one of that name, but for this the South is not to blame.

* * * * *

“But of this the friends of the South may be assured, that so long as they make no determined effort to relieve the Southern character from this false drapery, they will never gain for it that respect, that confidence in the rectitude of Southern motives, that active sympathy, which can alone evoke effective assistance....  The best assurance you can give that the destinies of the negro race are safe in Southern hands is, not that the South will repent and reform, but that she has consistently and conscientiously been the friend and benefactor of that race.

* * * * *

“It is, therefore, always with pain that we hear such expressions as ‘the foul blot,’ and similar ones, fall from the lips of earnest promoters of Confederate Independence.  As a concession they are useless; as a confession they are untrue....  Thus the Southerner may retort as we have seen that an Englishman would retort for his country.  He might say the South is proud, and of nothing more proud than this—­not that she has slaves, but that she has treated them as slaves never were treated before, that she has used power as no nation ever used it under similar circumstances, and that she has solved mercifully and humanely a most difficult problem which has elsewhere defied solution save in blood.  Or he might use the unspoken reflection of an honest Southerner at hearing much said of ‘the foul blot’:  ’It was indeed a dark and damnable blot that England left us with, and it required all the efforts of Southern Christianity to pale it as it now is[1200].’”

In 1862 and to the fall of 1863, The Index had declared that slavery was not an issue in the war; now its defence of the “domestic institution” of the South, repeatedly made in varying forms, was evidence of the great effect in England of Lincoln’s emancipation edicts. The Index could not keep away from the subject.  In March, quotations were given from the Reader, with adverse comments, upon a report of a controversy aroused in scientific circles by a paper read before the Anthropological Society of London.  James Hunt was the author and the paper, entitled “The Negro’s Place