Without spirit to resent, he, with his fellows, had endured the greatest evils of slavery.

With the curse of free labour on the land, there had been no incentive for toil, no hire for the labourer.

Like an incubus the system had lain over them, stifling all energy, checking all progress, retarding all prosperity save the prosperity of the great land-owners.

Then the soil had changed hands, and where the plough had broken the earth, the seeds of a democracy had germinated and put forth from the very blood of the battlefields.

In the upward pressure of class, he had seen the stability of custom yield at last to the impetus of an energy that was not racial but individual.