The materialist boldly tells us that physical law is the only law, and that there is no sin but the violation of the laws of our physical being, and that if these were understood and obeyed by all, there would be no sorrow, suffering or disorder in the world. But with a deeper insight, we do not need to live long on earth to learn that violation of moral law for a time will bring into fearful disorder, and actually subvert, physical law. If any truth in this world is manifest, it is that a nation is well balanced and secure just in proportion to the observance of the moral law respecting the family; that a commonwealth is prosperous and invincible, in its material as well as spiritual interests, exactly in proportion to the strength and purity of its homes, even to the humblest. Naught can bring such dire confusion and destruction as laxity of family relations; what, then, can you expect of those for whom the family was obliterated, and that by legal statute, for many generations? The freed people are by no means the only sufferers, for in obedience to the divine principle just referred to, precisely to that degree that the colored woman refuses to recognize marriage and a home, just so far is the whole region demoralized; and this obliquity over wide extent threatens the very vitals of our great republic. Educate, Christianize, inspire the young colored woman, and you save and elevate not only the entire colored race, but you brace up the white people of the South to moral standards far from universal now; you save all, in all their interests, temporal and eternal. The domestic relations are the deepest in life; they dictate and control all others. Make the home pure and powerful, and the soil will yield, and demand and supply will adjust themselves; cities will rise, and laws will protect, and schools will flourish, and the church will grow apace, and there is work and education and salvation for all. This is no idle picture; every one of us knows the reality of it. And it is because the home is the basis and centre of all earthly life—and who makes the home? Mainly, it is the woman. Therefore, save the woman; build her up hour by hour; feed her with wisdom of every kind; regulate her passion and emotion, discipline her reason, fortify her will, nerve her with principle, fire her with enthusiasm, and make her tender with Christ’s own love. In every mighty movement on earth, woman is at the bottom, and the problem which more than any other agitates this whole country to-day, is because of woman. She can wreck this nation, and she can deliver it. Man fought to save it; woman prays, teaches, suffers and sacrifices to save it.
One day at the South, while on a solitary walk, I stepped through the crazy paling, and spoke to a jolly black woman who was getting dinner in the yard just before the front door. She was about forty-five, with a superb physique, quite unfettered by fashion, for she wore but one garment, which did not hang in flounces, but in strings. The fire, or rather smoke, for I saw no fire, puffed up from a little heap of sticks, and over this swung a broken kettle, which, apart from the gourds lying about, was the only dish of the household. Into this kettle she had put a piece of grimy salt pork, with a share of bristles remaining on it, making a firm rind, and with it turnip-tops and cabbage-stumps, and she was then washing sweet potatoes; and such a nest of children in every stage of dirt and nakedness and hunger, and every one in densest ignorance and heathenism! The little hut couldn’t hold them, so they were ranged inside the paling, all in a row, forming a kind of animated hedge, their little bare, shining bodies flashing as they whisked in the sun, their big, round eyes gleaming with curiosity, and every single body of them poised to turn a somersault or two and ask me for a penny. The woman made a low courtesy, and a graceful one it was, and as I greeted the children the whole batch of them squealed and cackled, stood on their heads and came right side up with the wildest kind of a grin, in my very face.
“How many children have you,” I asked. “These are not all yours?”
“Yis, ma’am, dey is ebery one mine. I’se got fourteen.”
“Is your husband at home?” I inquired. I thought I spied a man in the cabin.
“He’s sick mos’ times,” she replied, “a’nt good for not’in’ but eat; he kin eat mo’n any nigger in all Car’line, though he don’ git de luck berry offen, dere’s so many ob us,” and she gave a chuckle.
“But how do you take care of so many?” was my question, as the vision of more than one overworked mother at the North, with her solitary child, flashed across me.
Such a loud, musical laugh!
“Why, bress yer soul, honey, I don’ car’ ob dem, dey takes car’ ob demselves,” and she leaned back and again she sang and rippled and rolled at the absurd idea of a mother’s taking care of her children.
I ask you to-day, what do you expect those children will do and become? It is for you to say.