asserted itself, then she had to fight like a tigress for the
ownership and possession of her own person, and oftentimes had to
suffer pains and lacerations for her virtuous self assertion. When she
reached maturity all the tender instincts of her womanhood were
ruthlessly violated. At the age of marriage, always prematurely
anticipated under slavery, she was mated as the stock of the
plantation were mated, not to be the companion of a loved and chosen
husband, but to be the breeder of human cattle for the field or
auction block."

Has this condition of affairs changed? I answer unequivocally, yea, a
thousand times, yea. A negative answer would be the quintessence of
ignorance. From a recent careful survey of every Southern state
through nearly one hundred trusty observers, I have the testimony that
the young women are pure in large numbers, and are rapidly increasing
in an intense desire and determination to preserve themselves chaste
and pure from the lustful approaches of the sinner, and that the
number of legally and lovingly married families, purely preserved in
the domestic and social virtues among husbands and wives, sons and
daughters, is so far beyond the days of slavery that a comparison
would minify the difference.

The marvel is, that the Negro has sufficient moral vitality left to
cut his way through the whirlpool of licentiousness to the solid rock
of Christian character. From the harem life of promiscuous and
unnameable sins of slavery, some of which were the natural and fatal
growth of pagan vices, others the fruit of prostitution, to the making
of one clean, beautiful, noble and divine family and home, covers a
period of intense, moral, spiritual and intellectual development, more
significant than the geologic transformation of ages. Be it known that