Step by step, the Southern negro is being forced back to the level upon which he stood before the war. The latest evidence of this is the abolition of all grades above the lowest grammar grades in the negro schools of New Orleans, by order of the school board. Only a few months ago, in that city a mob burned the fine public school building for negroes which had been erected through the benefaction of a wealthy negro; and the school has not been rebuilt. In several Southern States the negro has been practically disfranchised, by provisions which operate against the illiterate negro, but not against the illiterate white. Curtailing the school privileges of the negroes makes them illiterate, and then, being illiterate, it is decided they are not fit to vote. So disfranchisement is a logical step following the restriction of negro education. Disfranchised and reduced to illiteracy, the negro is back again in the position he occupied before the war, save that he is not held as the property of another man. And yet, under such circumstances, he is in the power of his Anglo-Saxon neighbors almost as fully as before his emancipation. And already, in Anderson County, South Carolina, the full re-establishment of negro slavery has been boldly attempted. The negro children in New Orleans number about twenty thousand, which is almost half the child population of the city. Of these twenty thousand negro children, less than half were in school last year. Left to roam about the streets and gain a street education in the susceptible years of childhood, they must naturally become criminals, and grow up a menace to the welfare of society around them. And to remedy this, it will be thought necessary to re-establish slavery. The negro slave was not dangerous to society. The South is rapidly approaching a time when it can be plausibly maintained that a return to the conditions of negro slavery is an actual necessity of the situation. And those words will yet come true which were written long ago of the time when probation would end and God’s children be delivered from their enemies: “I saw the pious slave rise in victory and triumph, and shake off the chains that bound him, while his wicked master was in confusion, and knew not what to do.”—“Early Writings,” page 146. There will be negro slaves when probation ends, and some of them will be numbered with those whom God accepts. This backward movement, it is said by some, is not a national one; but the reason it is not seen in the North is that the negroes are not in the North, but in the South. The principle of government by consent of the governed has been as fully repudiated in the one section as in the other.