Dr. Norman Macleod has made a noble speech in Glasgow
to the Freedmen's Aid Society. " When that mighty result took place," he said,—" the emancipation of four millions of the human race, he was amazed, he was ashamed, he was humbled, that no greater demonstration of thankfulness and rejoicing had been made by this country. If we had had a day of thanksgiving in Britain it would have been worthy of the land, but hardly had there been any recognition of it." And yet that indifference has been chiefly due to Scotch thought. It is Mr. Carlyle who, amidst many better lessons, has taught the leaders of intellectual opinion in this country, without whose co-operation all demonstrations hang fire, to sympathize with slavery. There is a curious hardness in the Scotch mind which sees a kind of fitness in a degraded race doing degrading work. Only men like Dr. Norman Macleod, who have given half the labour of their lives to raising those beneath them, can fully see the evil at the root of the Carlylean philosophy of "the beneficent whip."
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