that religious instruction ought to be imparted. In the latter days of North American slavery, an opinion that religious negroes were more tricky and idle than others became prevalent, and led to the withdrawal of religious teaching on many estates—the Churches making no protest.[1] Now it may be granted that the Churches were not called upon to denounce the unrighteousness of the sin of slavery while it was tolerated by the State. Bishops and pastors have to take the world as they find it in many matters, and the great majority in a slave State are likely to have been honestly in favour of an institution with which they were familiar from childhood. Still, even moderate men have always accounted it a blot on the great Christian sects, that in their desire not to lose their influence over the propertied classes they have habitually refrained from inculcating humanity, purity, and regard for family ties, except in a very general and abstract way. At any rate, the credit of abolishing the slave-trade, of freeing the slave by war in the United States, and by legal reforms in other countries, has been left essentially to secular politicians. The negro race is not that which has profited most by the abolition of slavery. The white labourer is even a greater gainer by the fact that he is no longer forced to compete with the products of unremunerated toil, and a disgrace that was reflected on all manual labour has been removed. The industrial classes have to thank the State everywhere for this reform, and, to say the least, owe no gratitude to the Churches.
In this matter of slavery, and in the cognate question of the right of workmen to unite in Trades-Unions that they may raise the rate of wages, what we have to
- ↑ See Olmsted's Journeys in the Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. pp. 212-229, and Kemble's Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation, pp. 342, 346.
