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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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UNCLE TOM’S CABINPREFACETHE scenes of this story, as its title indicates, lie among a race hitherto ig- nored by the associations of polite and refined society; an exotic race, whose an- cestors, born beneath a tropic sun, brought with them, and perpetuated to their descendants, a character so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race, as for many years to have won from it only misunderstanding and contempt. But another and better day is dawning; every influence of literature, of poetry, and of art, in our times, is becoming more and more in unison with the great mas- ter chord of Christianity, “good will to man.” The poet, the painter, and the artist now seek out and embellish the common and gentler humanities of life, and, under the allurements of fiction, breathe a hu- manizing and subduing influence, favorable to the development of the great prin- ciples of Christian brotherhood. The hand of the benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world and the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten. In this general movement, unhappy Africa at last is remembered; Africa, who began the race of civilization and human progress in the dim, gray dawn of early |
