close range of time and space, or vice versa, to be strictly
truthful), indicate the demoralizing and debasing effects of the
"system" from its initial period, this followed up by the blighting
influences of slave life, even under the most favorable conditions,
for nearly two hundred and fifty years, left upon Negro life and
character just the traits it would have left upon any other people
subjected to similar conditions for the same length of time.

It may be said, and with truth, that slavery gave to the Negro some of
the arts of civilized life; but it must be added, that, denying him
the inalienable rights of manhood, denying him the right to the
product of his labor, it left him no noble incentive to labor at these
arts, and thus tended to render him improvident, careless, shiftless,
in short, to demoralize his entire nature.

It is further stated that the system gave him Christianity. Did it
give him piety? Could it give him morality in the highest sense of
these terms?

Constantine could march the refractory Saxons to the banks of a stream
and give them their option between Christianity and the sword, but the
haughty monarch soon found that a religion forced in this peremptory
and wholesale fashion did not change the moral nature of the soldier;
and we submit that Christianity, language, and the arts of civilized
life, absorbed amidst the debasing influences of a cruel and infamous
bondage could not be productive of a harmonious development of body,
mind and soul; of strong moral and intellectual fiber; or of ideas of
the dignity of labor; of habits of thrift, economy, the careful
expenditure of time and money; or knowledge of the intimate
relationship of these two great factors in the process of