Time was, yesterday, it appears to me, when this great class were all of _one_ condition, driven from the rising to the setting of the sun to enrich men who were created out of the same sod, and in the construction of whose mysterious mechanism, mental and physical, the great God expended no more time or ingenuity.

Up to the close of the Rebellion, of that gigantic conflict which shook the pillars of republican government to their center, the great black population were truly the "mudsills" of Southern society, upon which rested all the industrial burdens of that section; truly, "the hewers of wood and the drawers of water;" a people who, in the mysterious providence of God, were torn root and branch from their savage homes in that land which has now become to them a dream "more insubstantial than a pageant faded," to "dwell in a strange land, among strangers," to endure, like the children of Israel, a season of cruel probation, and then to begin life in earnest; to put their shoulders to the wheel and assist in making this vast continent, this asylum of the oppressed of the world, the grandest abode of mingled happiness and woe, and wealth and pauperization ever reared by the genius and governed by the selfishness and cupidity of man.

And to-day, as in the dark days of the past, this people are the bone and sinew of the South, the great producers and partial consumers of her wealth; the despised, yet indispensable, "mudsills" of her industrial interests.
A Senator of the United States from the South, whose hands have been dyed in the blood of his fellow citizens, and who holds his high office by fraud and usurpation, not long since declared that his State could very well dispense with her black population.

That population outnumbers the white three to one; and by the toil by which that State has been enriched, by the blood and the sweat of two hundred years which the soil of that State has absorbed, by the present production and consumption of wealth by that black population, we are amazed at the ignorance of the great man who has been placed in a "little brief authority." The black population cannot and will not be dispensed with; because it is so deeply rooted in the soil that it is a part of it--the most valuable part.

And the time will come when it will hold its title to the land, by right of purchase, for a laborer is worthy of his hire, and is now free to invest that hire as it pleases him best.