These children are assiduously sent to schools, the support of which depends, in a great part, upon the voluntary gifts of the negroes. Grateful to the Gospel which has set them free, the former slaves have become passionately attached to their pastors; their first resources are consecrated to churches, to schools, and sometimes, also, to distant missions, to the evangelization of that Africa which they remember to do it good. We should be at once surprised and humiliated, were we to compare the much-vaunted gifts of our charity with those of these poor people, these freed men of yesterday, whom we think that we may rightfully treat with disdain.

Thanks to the Gospel, and it is to this that I return, the problem of the coexistence of races is resolved in the most pacific manner in the Antilles. Among freemen, however little these freemen may be Christianized, specific inequalities become speedily effaced, and the prejudice of skin is not found to be ultimately as insurmountable as we have been told. In these English colonies, which are true republics, governing themselves, and which also remind us, through this feature, of the Southern States, the blacks have come to be accepted as fellow-citizens. They practise the liberal professions; they are electors and often elected, for they form of themselves alone one-fifth of the Colonial Assembly at Jamaica; they are officers of the police and the militia, and their authority never fails to be recognized by all. I named Jamaica just now. Some may seek to bring it as an argument against me. The fact is, that this great island has seemed to form an exception to the general prosperity; considerable fortunes have been sunk there, and the transformation has been slower and more painful there than elsewhere. But, when they arm themselves with these circumstances, they forget two things: first, that the causes of the malady were anterior to emancipation; next, that the cure has come from emancipation itself. Before emancipation, Jamaica was insolvent, her plantations were mortgaged beyond their value, and its planting was threatened in other ways far more than now. Do you know what has since happened? Difficulties which appeared insoluble have been resolved; to-day, the cape is doubled, and men navigate in peace. At the present time, Jamaica comprises two or three hundred villages, inhabited by free negroes; the latter are willing to work; for, according to the latest information, (February, 1861,) the price of daily labor decreases instead of rising. Among these free negroes, there are not less than ten thousand landholders, and three-eighths of the cultivated soil is in their hands. They have established sugar-mills everywhere, imperfect, rude, yet working in a passable manner; and mills of this sort are numbered by thousands. The middle class of color thus grows richer day by day; the families that compose it all own a horse or a mule; they have their bank-books and their accounts with the savings banks. Lastly, which is of more value than all else, the free negroes of Jamaica have built more than two hundred chapels, and as many schools. At the very moment when I write these lines, an enthusiastic religious movement is prevailing among them; the rum-shops are abandoned, the most degraded classes enter in their turn the path of reformation.

I should have been glad to cite our own colonies instead of confining myself to the English islands. I have been prevented from this, not only by the memory of the conflagrations of 1859 at Martinique, and of the state of siege which it became necessary to proclaim there, but, above all, by the circumstance that the liberty of our former slaves has been too often restrained by means of the vagabond regulations, that labor has continued to be imposed on them to a certain point; that the parcelling out of property has been trammelled by fiscal measures; that, moreover, it is less the labor of our former slaves than of the Coolies and others employed, which has secured the success of our experiment; whence it follows that this success is far from being as conclusive as that which has been obtained elsewhere under the system of full liberty. Nevertheless, our success, which is no less real, signifies something also. If we have not yet those little free villages, that class of small negro landholders of which I just spoke, we have, like the English, free negroes in our militia and in our marine; like them, we have had our elections, and all classes of the population have taken part in them; like them, and perhaps in a greater degree, we have increased our sugar production since emancipation. It is true that the crisis of free trade has not yet passed among us, and that we cannot know how this would be supported by our colonial sugars. But it will not be long before we shall be informed on this point: by an act which we cannot but applaud, and which continues the work it has undertaken, the French government has just suppressed the protection continued hitherto to our planters. If, ere long, as it is justifiable to hope, they are delivered from the charges of the colonial system, whose advantages they have lost, we shall see them struggle, and successfully, I am convinced, against the Spanish sugars produced by slave labor.

It will be, perhaps, maintained, that the antipathy of race is stronger in the United States than elsewhere, and that the Americans, in this respect, are inferior to the English. I am as conscious as any one else of those infamous proceedings towards free negroes which are the crime of the North, a crime no less odious than that of the South. What conscience is not aroused at the thought of those prejudices of skin which do not permit blacks to sit by the side of whites, in schools, churches, or public vehicles? Only the other day, nothing less than a denunciation in open parliament was needed to begin the destruction, by a public rebuke, of the classification which is being made on the English steamers themselves between Liverpool and New York. There are some new States which purely and simply exclude free negroes from their Territory; those which do not exclude them from the Territory, repulse them from the ballot-box. The injustice, in fine, is as gross, as crying, as it is possible to imagine.

Must we conclude from this that the coexistence of races, possible elsewhere, is impossible in the United States? I distrust those sweeping assertions which resolve problems at one stroke; I refuse, above all, to admit so easily that iniquity must be maintained for the sole reason that it exists, and that it suffices to say: "I am thus made; what would you have? I cannot change myself," to abstract one's self from the accomplishment of the most elementary duty. To endure negroes at one's side, to respect their independence, to abstain from wrongs towards them, to consent to the full exercise of their rights, is an elementary duty; Christian duty, I need not say, demands something better.

Does this mean that we are to set ourselves up as judges, and brand as wretches all those who thus mistake the laws of charity and justice? I fear much that, in their place, we would do precisely as they. Living in the South, we would have slaves, and would defend slavery to the last; living in the North, we would tread under foot the free colored class. Is there then neither the true, nor the false, nor justice, nor injustice? God forbid! The just and the true remain; iniquity should be condemned without pity; but we are bound to be more indulgent towards men than, towards things. We are bound to remember that the influence of surroundings is enormous, and that, if crimes are always without excuse, there are many excusable criminals. When we examine men by the prejudice of skin, such as prevails in the United States, we are not long in discovering that it rests in great part on a misunderstanding: men mistake coexistence for amalgamation. I do not fear to affirm that the second would be as undesirable as the first would be desirable. Why dream of blending or of assimilating the two races? Why pursue as an ideal frequent marriages between them, and the formation of a third race: that of mulattoes? America does right to resist such ideas, and to inscribe her testimony against such a future, evidently very little in conformity with the designs of God.

But coexistence by no means draws amalgamation in its train. On this point, also, experience has spoken. In the English colonies, the liberty of the blacks is entire, the legal equality of the two races is not contested, public manners have shaped themselves to that mutual consideration without which they could not live together; yet neither amalgamation nor assimilation is in question, and the aristocracy of skin remains what it should be, a lasting distinction, accepted on both sides, between races which are not designed to mingle together. I do not know that many marriages are contracted between the whites and the negresses of Jamaica, and I believe that the class of mulattoes increases much more rapidly under slavery than with liberty. Look in this respect at what takes place even now in the United States: as quadroons sell better than blacks, mixtures, of white or almost white slaves abound there, and the unhappy women who refuse to lend themselves to certain combinations are often whipped in punishment.

With liberty, each race can at least remain by itself; with it, there can be coexistence without amalgamation; both mingling and hostility can be prevented. This is the more easy, inasmuch as the negroes, with the gentleness of their race, willingly accept the second place, and by no means demand what we insist on refusing them. Let their liberty be complete, let legal equality and friendly relations be maintained, and they will ask no more.

But they will ask no less, and they are right. I do not understand, in truth, why so harmless a co-existence should be so long repulsed by the enlightened people of the United States. There are negroes in Spanish America who have reached the highest grades of the army, and who show as much intelligence, decorum, and dignity in command as white men could do. I myself have seen at Paris, a clergyman of ebony blackness, who was really the most distinguished, unexceptionable man that it was possible to meet; he was a remarkable scholar, and had received the title of doctor from several European universities.

In fact, the negroes are our fellows and our equals much more than we imagine; they adapt themselves better than the Indians to our civilization. They seek to be instructed, and not only do the free blacks of the English islands hasten, as we have seen, to provide themselves with teachers, but even those of the United States, crushed as they are by contemptuous treatment, neglect no means of introducing their children into the schools, where is found one-ninth of their total number. In Liberia, they have shown themselves hitherto very capable of ruling. In Hayti, since their deliverance from the ridiculous and odious yoke of Soulouque, they have advanced rapidly, it is affirmed, in the way of true progress; legal marriages increase, popular instruction is becoming established, religious liberty is respected. Lastly, in the negro colony of Buxton, in Canada, the fugitive slaves have become industrious landholders, and are respected by all.