His grasp of the conditions of freedom is slow and uncertain.

But give him time, lend him a helping hand, and he will completely master the situation.
In one of the most remarkable pamphlets of the time, written by C.K.
Marshall, D.D., of Vicksburg, Miss., entitled _The Colored Race Weighed in the Balance_, being a reply to a most malicious speech by J.L.Tucker, D.D., of Jackson, Miss., I find many truths that the American people should know.

Both Dr.Marshall and Dr.Tucker are white ministers of the South, and both should be intimately acquainted with the characteristics, capacity and progress of the colored people.
But Dr.Tucker appears to be as ignorant of the colored race as if he had spent his days in the Sandwich Islands instead of the sunny land of the South.
Dr.Marshall says (p.

55): I think I know nearly all that can be said against a Negro.
In one form or another, the complaints have been a thousand times reiterated; but has he not been, and is he not now what the white man and society have made him?
He is naturally peace-loving, docile, and imitative.

If kindly and justly treated, with due allowance for the _peculiar elements_ that make up his life, he will render back, in kind at least, equally with the brother in white in _like surroundings_.