in St. Vincent, in British Guiana, in Barbadoes, in Trinidad and in Grenada, British slavery was far worse than American slavery.  In these colonies “the slave was generally a barbarian, speaking an unknown tongue, and working with men like himself, in gangs with scarcely a chance for improvement.”  An economist says, had the slaves of the British colonies been as well fed, clothed, lodged, and otherwise cared for as were those of the United States, their number at emancipation would have reached from seventeen to twenty millions, whereas the actual number emancipated was only 660,000.  Had the blacks of the United States experienced the same treatment as did those of the British colonies, 1860 would have found among us less than 150,000 colored persons.  In the United States were found ten colored persons for every slave imported, while in the British colonies only one was found for every three imported.  Hence the claim that the American Negro is a new race, built up on this soil, rests upon an ample supply of facts.  The American slave was born in our civilization, fed upon good American food, housed and clothed on a civilized plan, taught the arts and language of civilization, acquired necessarily ideas of law and liberty, and by 1860 was well on the road toward fitness for freedom.  No lessons therefore drawn from the emancipation of British slaves in the West Indies are of any direct value to us, inasmuch as British slavery was not like American slavery, the British freedman was in no sense the equal of the American freedman, and the circumstances surrounding the emancipation of the British slave had nothing of the inspiring and ennobling character with those connected with the breaking of the American Negro’s chains.  Yet, superior as the American Negro was as a slave, he was very far below the standard of American citizenship as subsequent events conclusively proved.  The best form of slavery, even though it may lead toward fitness for freedom, can never be regarded as a fit school in which to graduate citizens of so magnificent an empire as the United States.

The slave of 1860 was perhaps, all things considered, the best slave the world had ever seen, if we except those who served the Hebrews under the Mosaic statutes.  While there was no such thing among them as legal marriage or legitimate childhood, yet slave “families” were recognized even on the auction block, and after emancipation legal family life was erected generally upon relationships which had been formed in slavery.  Bishop Gaines, himself born a slave of slave parents, says:  “The Negro had no civil rights under the codes of the Southern States.  It was often the case, it is true, that the marriage ceremony was performed, and thousands of couples regarded it, and observed it as of binding force, and were as true to each other as if they had been lawfully married.” * * * “The colored people generally,” he says, “held their marriage (if such unauthorized union may be called marriage) sacred, even while they