penetrans, or the jigger, which can inflict great pain on barefooted people by housing itself under their toe-nails.  This Colony had a plague of jiggers, and every expedient for defeating them had failed.  Lincoln was not merely giving the practical attention to this difficulty that might perhaps be expected; the Chaplain was amazed to find that at that moment, at the turning point of the war, a few days only after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, with his enormous pre-occupations, the President’s mind had room for real and keen distress about the toes of the blacks in the Cow Island.  At the end of yet another interview Eaton was startled by the question, put by the President with an air of shyness, whether Frederick Douglass, a well-known negro preacher, could be induced to visit him.  Of course he could.  Frederick Douglass was then reputed to be the ablest man ever born as a negro slave; he must have met many of the best and kindest Northern friends of the negro; and he went to Lincoln distressed at some points in his policy, particularly at his failure to make reprisals for murders of negro prisoners by Southern troops.  When he came away he was in a state little short of ecstasy.  It was not because he now understood, as he did, Lincoln’s policy.  Lincoln had indeed won his warm approval when he told him “with a quiver in his voice” of his horror of killing men in cold blood for what had been done by others, and his dread of what might follow such a policy; but he had a deeper gratification, the strangeness of which it is sad to realise.  “He treated me as a man,” exclaimed Douglass.  “He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our skins.”

Perhaps the hardest effort of speech that Lincoln ever essayed was an address to negroes which had to do with this very subject of colour.  His audience were men who had been free from birth or for some time and were believed to be leaders among their community.  It was Lincoln’s object to induce some of them to be pioneers in an attempt at colonisation in some suitable climate, an attempt which he felt must fail if it started with negroes whose “intellects were clouded by slavery.”  He clung to these projects of colonisation, as probably the best among the various means by which the improvement of the negro must be attempted, because their race, “suffering the greatest wrong ever inflicted on any people,” would “yet be far removed from being on an equality with the white race” when they ceased to be slaves; a “physical difference broader than exists between almost any other two races” and constituting “a greater disadvantage to us both,” would always set a “ban” upon the negroes even where they were best treated in America.  This unpalatable fact he put before them with that total absence of pretence which was probably the only possible form of tact in such a discussion, with no affectation of a hope that progress would remove it or of a desire