that which preserves pure and distinct the various kinds of animals. How strong and general this impression was, few readers can have forgotten. When Miss Kemble came first to Boston, in 1832, she sat next to the late John Quincy Adams at dinner one day, and the conversation turned upon the tragedy of "Othello." Mrs. Kemble has since reported one of Mr. Adams's remarks on this subject: "Talking to me about Desdemona, he assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgment upon her for having married a nigger!"* If this anecdote had not come to us on such respectable authority, we could hardly believe it of a man who, during the last and best ten years of his life, was looked upon as the black man's champion. Mrs. Kemble adds a suggestion of a new "point" in the play for Southern audiences: "I hate the nigger," she thought, would have a far stronger effect in Charleston or Savannah than "I hate the Moor."

Some readers have doubtless noted the incident related by Mr. Seward, in his autobiography, of his first visit, in 1819, to a New York theatre. The youthful runaway student ventured into the gallery of the Park Theatre one evening, induced thereto by the low price of the ticket. At the end of the first act of a melting drama, which had wholly absorbed him, he discovered, to his confusion and dismay, that he was the object of loud and contemptuous laughter to a great crowd of men, women, and boys, on the opposite side of the gallery. While he was looking to see what there might be amiss in his person or neighborhood, a colored man, black as the ace of spades, but of gentle demeanor, came to him and meekly said, " Guess young master don't know that he's got into the colored folks' part of the gallery." The blushing lad, as a matter of course, instantly left the reputable and decent colored people near whom he was sitting, and took a place among the vicious and disorderly whites. The jeering

ceased at once.

The noticeable thing about this anecdote is, the manner in which the situation was accepted both by white and black. The worthy colored man sympathized with the embarrassment of the youth, recognizing the infinite and disastrous impropriety he had committed; and the sandy-haired lad from Union College in

"Journal of a Residence in Georgia," p. 86.

ferred from the incident how far he was from being fit "to be gin the world alone." Neither that shy student, nor the kind and gentlemanlike black man, nor the scurrilous crowd of the old Park gallery, accepted gravitation with a more instinctive and blind certainty than they did the law which decreed that black people and white people could not sit together in a public place. Forty years later there was a Seward who rose to a fine strain of prophecy in the well-known words, "No man will ever be President of the United States who spells negro with two g's."

Nothing was strong enough to stand against this prejudice. Theodore Parker himself dismissed from his school near Boston, in 1832, a colored girl, "in deference to the objections of some of his patrons." He did this with reluctance-he confessed it with shame; but he did it. All examples of this nature, however, pale before the one related with so much astounding detail by the late Rev. Samuel J. May, in his "Recollections." Of this little work, which most readers overlooked at the time of its publication, one thing may be truly said: no proper history of the United States can ever be written which does not contain the substance of its revelations. It is "material" of that accidental and authentic kind, like the testimony of a highly-intelligent by-stander, which is so dear to the faithful seeker after truth. Nothing in it reads so much like the record of an extinct barbarism of the sixth century B. C., as the history of Miss Prudence Crandall's attempt to found a boarding-school for colored girls in Connecticut, Anno Domini 1832. The gorge of staid Connecticut rose at the thought of having "a school for nigger-girls" planted in one of its umbrageous villages, to the detriment of real estate; for who could be expected to select as a place of residence a village polluted by " a nigger-school?" The people assembled in public meeting to denounce the nefarious enterprise; and when the term opened with fifteen or twenty well-behaved and respectable colored girls from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Providence, the following things were done: The storekeepers, butchers, and milkmen, unanimously refused to serve the school or sell anything to its pupils, so that supplies had to be brought in from a distance; none of the inmates could appear in the streets without being insulted; the steps and doors were

smeared, and the well filled, with filth; a young lady of seventeen, from Providence, a pupil of the school, was threatened with prosecution under an ancient vagrant law, the penalty of which was "ten stripes on the naked body;" an act was obtained from the Legislature, making the school an illegal enterprise, under which Miss Crandall was imprisoned in the murderers' cell of the county jail; the village doctor refused to visit the sick pupils, and the trustees of the church forbade the inmates of the institution to set foot in their building; and, finally, when all these legal measures had failed, lawless violence was resorted to. First, their house was set on fire, but the fire was discovered in time to prevent its spread; and, a few days after, at midnight, the home of these innocent and defenseless girls was assailed by ruffians with clubs and iron bars, and ninety panes of glass broken. Miss Crandall then quietly resolved to give up the attempt, since it was manifestly impossible for a little company of young women to resist violence of this kind. A little child and justice may be a match for all the judges, lawyers, legislators, and real-estate men in a community, so long as only legal weapons are employed; but against clubs, iron bars, and midnight mobs, women and children are powerless. The mob gave them an honorable release from martyrdom, and Miss Prudence Crandall retired with her pupils and her glory.

The individuals who did these things in 1832 felt that they had the people of the United States behind them. And they had, except a few tolerated Quakers and a few hated abolitionists. All men and women, all boys and girls, of the white races in the United States, heartily agreed with one of the "honorable" leaders in this affair who roared in the ears of the devoted and heroic May: "We are not merely opposed to that school; we mean there shall not be such a school set up anywhere in our State. The colored people never can rise from their menial condition in our country; they ought not to be permitted to rise here. They are an inferior race of beings, and never can or ought to be rec⚫ognized as the equals of the whites. Let the niggers and their descendants be sent back to their fatherland, and there improve themselves as much as they may. The condition of the colored population of our country can never be essentially improved on this continent!" And so said nearly all of us who were then

alive. The negro pew or gallery came as natural to the children of that generation as the Fourth of July.

Was this a genuine antipathy? Happily, most of us at the North can now consider a question of this kind with as little of passion as if we were Cuviers or Darwins discussing a point in natural history. It is a point in natural history. Antipathy is known to be an indispensable ingredient in the constitution of things as necessary, in fact, to the continuance of life in the universe, as sexual attraction itself. That the dog does not relish the propinquity of the cat is nothing against the cat; that the cat recoils from the dog in horror and affright is nothing against the dog. There are creatures who cannot endure the presence of their superiors; but this is not to be set down to the discredit of the superiors. "If I love thee," says Spinoza, "what is that to thee? If thou hatest me, what is that to me?"

A fact against the antipathy doctrine is that the black race does not reciprocate the repugnance. When Mrs. Kemble, on going the round of the infirmary of her Georgia plantation, saw a bewitching colored baby lying asleep on its mother's lap, all the mother stirring in her own good heart, she stooped and kissed the child. The black mother, so far from showing displeasure, was thrilled with delight, and all the circle of dusky countenances beamed. A cat does not feel so when a dog puts its cold nose near one of her kittens. A fact more decisive is, that the assumed antipathy does not answer the great object of an antipathy in keeping the two races distinct.

Since, then, this repugnance felt by some white people is not reciprocated by the black, since it does not keep the two races from mingling their blood, and since the offspring possesses also the reproductive power, it is certain that the repugnance is not a natural antipathy, like that which exists between the tiger and the lion, the canary and the yellow-bird, the rattlesnake and the copperhead.

These facts would suffice if we were all philosophic and disinterested naturalists. The present writer saw, a few months ago,. a colored student seated very happily in the midst of the senior class of a New England college, taking his share in the recitation of the hour, and no one seemed to suffer from his proximity; but the reader has probably not forgotten that two students of a

New Jersey college were recently unable to take their morning portion of metaphysics because a colored student was listening to the same lecture. There are suits pending against New York landlords for declining to admit colored persons to their hotels, and in extensive portions of the country, as we remarked above, the white man's recoil from the black has been made more decisive by recent events. To recur to Charleston: it was noticed by the Times correspondent that the emancipation holiday last year, for the first time, had not one white participant. Several of the holiday-makers were white enough in color, and would pass for white men anywhere in the world but where their parentage was known. "Here," as the correspondent says, one drop of black blood is more carefully traced and registered than the old blue blood of Spain." We may be pardoned, therefore, for adding one or two other considerations not drawn from natural history.

This color repugnance is usually observed to be strongest in the meanest. Among the educated people of the Southern States it was never half so strong as in the "white trash," and in the adventurers from other regions who had an interest in flattering the poor white trash. The man who made the disturbance about the colored person in the omnibus was generally a snob, more or less disguised. He might be a gorgeous gambler, a sham D. D., a pushing storekeeper, a small politician; but commonly the soul of a scamp was in him. At the North it was never the really high man or woman who felt aggrieved at the presence of a decent colored man. The most pleasing object shown to visitors at Daniel Webster's house, at Marshfield, was a portrait in oil of an old colored servant (very black), which hung in the principal room of the mansion. And who has not seen lovely and refined little white girls rush into the arms of a motherly negro nurse, black, corpulent, big-lipped, broad-nosed, and cover her spacious mouth with kisses? We may see this every day in Baltimore or Richmond, and it is no very uncommon sight in Boston and New York. We have seen black and white children sitting in perfect content side by side, in the same class at school, playing together, eating together, and no more regarding one another's color than so many black and white lambs playing on a June morning upon the daisied slopes of a New Hampshire