itself with fire and sword- a reason for leaving four millions of the nation's truest friends with just cause of complaint against the Federal government? If the doctrine that taxation should go hand in hand with representation can be appealed to in behalf of recent traitors and rebels, may it not properly be asserted in behalf of a people who have ever been loyal and faithful to the government? The answers to these questions are too obvious to require statement. Disguise it as we may, we are still a divided nation. The Rebel States have still an anti-national policy. Massachusetts and South Carolina may draw tears from the eyes of our tender-hearted President by walking arm in arm into his Philadelphia Convention, but a citizen of Massachusetts is still an alien in the Palmetto State. There is that, all over the South, which frightens Yankee industry, capital, and skill from its borders. We have crushed the Rebellion, but not its hopes or its malign purposes. The South fought for perfect and permanent control over the Southern laborer. It was a war of the rich against the poor. They who waged it had no objection to the government, while they could use it as a means of confirming their power over the labor

er.

They fought the government, not because they hated the government as such, but because they found it, as they thought, in the way between them and their one grand purpose of rendering permanent and indestructible their authority and power over the Southern laborer. Though the battle is for the present lost, the hope of gaining this object still exists, and pervades the whole South with a feverish excitement. We have thus far only gained a Union without unity, marriage without love, victory without peace. The hope of gaining by politics what they lost by the sword, is the secret of all this Southern unrest; and that hope must be extinguished before national ideas and objects can take full possession of the Southern mind. There is but one safe and constitutional way to banish that mischievous hope from the South, and

that is by lifting the laborer beyond the unfriendly political designs of his former master. Give the negro the elective franchise, and you at once destroy the purely sectional policy, and wheel the Southern States into line with national interests and national objects. The last and shrewdest turn of Southern politics is a recognition of the necessity of getting into Congress immediately, and at any price. The South will comply with any conditions but suffrage for the negro. It will swallow all the unconstitutional test oaths, repeal all the ordinances of Secession, repudiate the Rebel debt, promise to pay the debt incurred in conquering its people, pass all the constitutional amendments, if only it can have the negro left under its political control. The proposition is as modest as that made on the mountain: "All these things will I give unto thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me."

But why are the Southerners so willing to make these sacrifices? The answer plainly is, they see in this policy the only hope of saving something of their old sectional peculiarities and pow

er.

Once firmly seated in Congress, their alliance with Northern Democrats re-established, their States restored to their former position inside the Union, they can easily find means of keeping the Federal government entirely too busy with other important matters to pay much attention to the local affairs of the Southern States. Under the potent shield of State Rights, the game would be in their own hands. Does any sane man doubt for a moment that the men who followed Jefferson Davis through the late terrible Rebellion, often marching barefooted and hungry, naked and penniless, and who now only profess an enforced loyalty, would plunge this country into a foreign war to-day, if they could thereby gain their coveted independence, and their still more coveted mastery over the negroes? Plainly enough, the peace not less than the prosperity of this country is involved in the great measure of impartial suffrage. King Cotton is de

posed, but only deposed, and is ready to-day to reassert all his ancient pretensions upon the first favorable opportunity. Foreign countries abound with his agents. They are able, vigilant, devoted. The young men of the South burn with the desire to regain what they call the lost cause; the women are noisily malignant towards the Federal government. In fact, all the elements of treason and rebellion are there under the thinnest disguise which necessity can impose.

What, then, is the work before Congress? It is to save the people of the South from themselves, and the nation from detriment on their account. Congress must supplant the evident sectional tendencies of the South by national dispositions and tendencies. It must cause national ideas and objects to take the lead and control the politics of those States. It must cease to recognize the old slave-masters as the only competent persons to rule the South. In a word, it must enfranchise the negro, and by means of the loyal negroes and the loyal white men of the South build up a national party there, and in time bridge the chasm between North and South, so that our country may have a common liberty and a common civilization. The new wine must be put into new bottles. The lamb may not be trusted with the wolf. Loyalty is hardly safe with trai

tors.

Statesmen of America! beware what you do. The ploughshare of rebellion has gone through the land beam-deep. The soil is in readiness, and the seedtime has come. Nations, not less than individuals, reap as they sow. The dreadful calamities of the past few years came not by accident, nor unbidden, from the ground. You shudder

to-day at the harvest of blood sown in the spring-time of the Republic by your patriot fathers. The principle of slavery, which they tolerated under the erroneous impression that it would soon die out, became at last the dominant principle and power at the South. It early mastered the Constitution, became superior to the Union, and enthroned itself above the law.

Freedom of speech and of the press it slowly but successfully banished from the South, dictated its own code of honor and manners to the nation, brandished the bludgeon and the bowieknife over Congressional debate, sapped the foundations of loyalty, dried up the springs of patriotism, blotted. out the testimonies of the fathers against oppression, padlocked the pulpit, expelled liberty from its literature, invented nonsensical theories about master-races and slave-races of men, and in due season produced a Rebellion fierce, foul, and bloody.

This evil principle again seeks admission into our body politic. It comes now in shape of a denial of political rights to four million loyal colored people. The South does not now ask for slavery. It only asks for a large degraded caste, which shall have no political rights. This ends the case. Statesmen, beware what you do. The destiny of unborn and unnumbered generations is in your hands. Will you repeat the mistake of your fathers, who sinned ignorantly? or will you profit by the blood-bought wisdom all round you, and forever expel every vestige of the old abomination from our national borders? As you members of the Thirty-ninth Congress decide, will the country be peaceful, united, and happy, or troubled, divided, and miserable.

WHE

WHEN the present writer was a small boy, he firmly believed Fairyland to be in the asparagus-bed, and envied the house-cat her ability to traverse that weird and waving forest into which, through thick stems, he could only peer. And then, too, being allowed to sit up one night an hour later than usual, and listen to the reading of Irving's "Tour on the Prairies " (just out), the next day he, with a comrade (in time a gallant captain of Massachusetts Volunteers), procured sticks that imagination shaped to rifles, and started due west from the streets of the seaside village. They went gloriously on, deep and deeper into the forest, in the full conviction that it opened first upon the borders of the land of deer and buffalo, when they came to a stone fence, and then a road, a travelled and dusty highway. Right across their pioneer path it ran, and the sight of it struck a chill conviction to their hearts that civilization had gone ahead of them, and that they should never see buffalo. The writer never has seen buffalo to this day, except one herd of hideous brutes, that stared at him out of the Pontine Marshes, as he rode by on the banquette of the Rome and Naples diligence.

These two dreams of boyhood came back to us with the late fine autumnal weather, and set us to thinking upon the marvellousness of childhood. It is a world of life apart. It has its own laws, mysteries, illusions or realities, whichever you please. And nothing is more surprising than the way in which grownup men and women not only pass out of it, but of all memory of it, and become altogether different beings. If Wordsworth's saying hold, "The child is father to the man," but retort the proverb, "It is a wise child that knows its own father." Who shall read for us the riddle of boyhood? It is not mimicry of manhood. Men and women are not children of a larger

·we can

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growth, they are men and women. suppose the children of the Rollo Series might indeed be blown up into ordinary men and women, being such on a small scale; but they are not at all like real boys and girls. What passes over childhood is a change, such as comes upon puppies and kittens and colts and lambs and cubs and whelps of every kind. Boys imitate men, and little girls likewise play at housekeeping; but in the manner of the imitation there is the same ludicrous disproportion and whimsicality which one sees in children dressed up in the clothes of their elders. There is unto them a law of their own. When the imitation is really well done, as in the mimic Senate of the pages of Congress, it is nothing but clever acting, and the most wearisome of sights. There is a story of a comedy performed by monkeys with wonderful spirit and gravity, till a mischievous spectator threw a handful of nuts on the stage, when kings, lovers, and heroes suddenly fell into a four-footed scramble, in utter oblivion of their parts. question of personal interest thrown among these boy debaters would probably produce a scene compared to which the liveliest rows of the grown-up houses would be tame.

So the first

The Kingdom of Infancy is the direct heir of that of the Medes and Persians, whose laws alter not. Look at boys' games. Do they change? Men change. When we were a boy, we made our first journey to Boston in a stage-coach, and were treated to a ride in the first railway cars which had begun to unite the metropolis to the country towns. A wooden line-of-battle ship was a marvel in our eyes, — great, massive, invincible. Bunker Hill Monument rose then about seventy feet, and every one said would probably never be finished. A telegraph was a thing with wooden arms, which made strange signs in the air, like a lunatic windmill. The Atlantic Monthly of that day was