he was seized by three slave-hunters, who took him towards the canal.
A number of abolitionists assembled to rescue the slave, but the
three men drew their revolvers, and no abolitionist had the courage
to fire the first shot. The slave was put in a canal boat and went
south; his wife remained in Joliet and earned her bread by weaving
drugget; the daughter came to my school; she was of pure negro blood,
but was taught with the white girls.

The abolitionists were increasing in number, and during the war with
the South the slaves were freed. They are now like Israel in Egypt,
they increase too rapidly. If father Abraham had sent them back to
Africa when they were only four millions, he would have earned the
gratitude of his country. Now they number more than eight millions;
the Sunny South agrees with their constitution; they work as little
and steal as much as possible. In the days of their bondage they
were addicted to petty larceny; now they have votes, and when they
achieve place and power they are addicted to grand larceny, and they
loot the public treasury as unblushingly as the white politicians.

The nigger question has doubled in magnitude during the last thirty
years, and there will have to be another abolition campaign of some
kind. The blacks are incapable of ruling the whites; no time was
given to educate them for their new duties, if teaching them was
possible; the Declaration of Independence was in their case a mockery
from the beginning. When all the old abolitionists and slave-holders
are dead, another generation of men grown wiser by the failure of the
policy of their forefathers may solve the black problem.

Complaint is made that the American education of to-day is in a
chaotic condition, due to the want of any definite idea of what