There are, however, two facts which sharply distinguish between the work we have to do among our emancipated slaves and that set before Russia among her emancipated serfs, and which make it more conspicuously obvious than it can be in Russia that we need schools.  We have, first of all, to contend with the prejudice of color.  We have been told how great that is.  I need spend no time in repeating this while the debates at Worcester and in the Episcopal Convention at New York ring in our ears; while Harvard seniors can not elect for class orator the ablest and fittest man they have if he happens to be colored, without eliciting from New York newspapers two-column editorials of amazement; and while writers as wise, as informed, and as calm as George Cable, are unable to write without showing their quivering apprehension of a race war.  The wickedness of this class feeling is conceded by all good men, and I need not dwell upon it.

The cause of it has been largely overlooked, and therefore the remedies so often advocated have proved futile.  Until the cause is distinctly recognized and acknowledged and remedied, the prejudice will remain.  The cause is this:  All freeborn people in every age and clime have had a contempt for slaves.  That is very near the feeling—­mark my words—­they ought to have.  It was stronger in Athens than it has ever been in Charleston.  It is partly, and has always been largely, caused by the wicked pride of mastership, but it has also been largely inspired by the perception of those vices and inferiorities which his condition breeds in the slave.  Ignorance, deceit, cowardice, are contemptible; and therefore men who know better fall into the way of despising those who are ignorant and cowardly instead of trying to help them become the reverse of all these things.  In nearly every other nation—­there are two exceptions that will readily occur to you—­save our own, as soon as the slave’s chains have been broken and the slave’s vices eradicated, the emancipated man has been absorbed among the class of freemen.  There was nothing left to suggest that he had ever been a slave.  The people forgot it.  But the black man bears an ineffaceable mark that he belongs to a race which has been enslaved; and it is, therefore, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred unconsciously but instinctively assumed that his is still the servile character.  There is no natural antipathy between the white and the black races; if there were there could be no mulattoes.  The sole reason of the persistence of this caste feeling is that the black man bears the mark saying to every one that sees him, “I belong to a race that has been enslaved:”  and unconsciously men assume, “Therefore your character is still a servile character.”  The prejudice is deep; it is almost universal; and so long as there is a God in heaven who led forth the Hebrews and overthrew the Pharaohs, there will be no safety for this Nation of ours until the prejudice is obliterated, as completely