justify themselves in so doing, and lose little credit thereby. These facts and considerations invest with growing interest the subject, multiply questionings, and greatly deepen the solicitude of the thoughtful as they seek to forecast events, and, peering wistfully into the future, look with too little success for gleams of light or harbingers of better days.

Washington inculcated in his Farewell Address that intelligence and morality are "indispensable supports" of free institutions, and that all morality that is not the outgrowth of religious principle is of questionable worth. Nor is this the voice of the Father of his Country only. It is the generally accepted axiom of those who treat of republican institutions. And yet among the teachings of the census-tables are found such items as these. In the Southern States, of the white children alone sixty-one per cent are never seen at school; of the colored children "eighty-eight per cent are habitually absent." "Of every one hundred colored children in North Carolina ninety-one never enter a school. In Georgia ninety-five per cent receive no instruction. In Mississippi the per cent is ninety-six." "Ten years," says the United States Commissioner of Education, "without schools for children will insure an adult generation of ignorant citizens, who in losing the knowledge of will have lost the desire for letters." With truth he added: "Were an invading hostile army to threaten our frontiers the whole people would rise in arms to repel them; but these tables show the mustering of the hosts of a deadlier foe, a more relentless enemy, already within our borders and by our very firesides; a great army of ignorance growing ever stronger, denser, and more invincible."

The demon of slavery has indeed been exorcised and cast out of the body politic, but other evil spirits remain to torment, if not destroy. The same elements of character in the dominant race that not only rendered slavery endurable, but demanded it and made its protection, support, and conservation the condition precedent of all affiliation in church or state, still remain to be provided for, guarded against, or eliminated, in our efforts to maintain our free form of government. Perhaps, indeed, legislation has done its best or utmost, and all

that now remains, or can be done, is to bring up the popular sentiment and character to its standard. Can it be done?

In January, 1871, the author appealed, through the pages of the "Atlantic Monthly," to the members of the Republican party to take a "new departure" and incorporate philanthropic and patriotic with political action; in other words, to engage individually and socially, and outside of party organization, in missionary work to prepare those made free to use intelligently and wisely the power their enfranchisement has given them. "The two great necessities," he said, "of the country at the present time are UNIFICATION and EDUCATION." In behalf of the former he said: "To make the people one in spirit and purpose, to remove everything calculated to engender and perpetuate strife or promote sectional animosities and interests, should be regarded, during the generation now entered upon, as the special work of the bravest philanthropy and of the purest and most enlarged statesmanship." To the latter, after urging the usual considerations in support of its essential necessity to the maintenance of free institutions, and considering some of the serious difficulties in the way of its effective promotion, he invited the earnest and thoughtful attention of his countrymen. "I do not assume the office of instructor," he said, "nor do I propose to indicate what is to be done, or how this grave exigency is to be met. I only bespeak here a careful study of this great social and national problem, thus suddenly forced upon the Republic. Fully believing that the nation has never witnessed an hour, not even in the darkest night of the Rebellion, when there were presented more pressing claims for special effort, or when there were demanded of the patriotic, philanthropic, and pious men of thought, more time, effort, and personal sacrifice, I present the matter as second to no question now before the country.”

But if there was in 1871 foundation for such solicitude and alarm, how much greater the occasion now. Then the governments in the reconstructed States were mainly, if not entirely, in the hands of men loyal not only to their country, but to the principles and policy of the Republican party. Not wholly without mistakes or unworthy members in their administrations, the tendency was upward, and the drift was

in the right direction. The freedmen were cared for, a policy was inaugurated embracing, as already noted, with their ac tive participation in the affairs of government, a preparation, aided largely by Northern philanthropy and Christian beneficence, educational and industrial, for their new and untried position. Inadequate, almost ludicrously so, to the great and manifold exigencies of the situation, except as the beginning and earnest of greater and more systematic efforts, they excited hopes and encouraged expectations for the new-formed commonwealths of the South. But all this is now changed. A reaction has taken place. The old régime is reinstated, and everything, save legal chattelhood, is to be restored. Race distinctions, class legislations, the dogmas that this is a white man's government, that the negro belongs to an inferior race, that capital should control, if it does not own, labor, are now in the ascendant, and CASTE, if slavery may not be, is to be thecorner-stone" of Southern civilization. At least, this is the avowed purpose. "Labor," says, recently, a governor of one of these reconstructed States, "must be controlled by law. We may hold inviolate every law of the United States, and still so legislate upon our labor system as to retain our old plantation system, or, in lieu of that, a baronial system." Clothe these sentiments, uttered without rebuke or dissent from those he assumes to represent, with power, as they have been by restored Democratic ascendency in most of the Southern States, in several of the Northern, and in the popular branch of Congress, and the wonder ceases that education languishes, that the number of scholars diminishes, that school laws are repealed or rendered useless, and that Northern philanthropy is discour aged. But without some such agencies, whence can come the unification and education required?

The Christian, who traces God's hand in American history, recalls the many Divine interpositions therein recorded, gathers courage from the review, and, though the omens seem unpropitious, finds it hard to despair of the Republic. And yet even he whose trust is the strongest forgets not that God accomplishes his purposes by human instrumentalities, and that no faith, personal or national, is legitimate or of much avail that is not accompanied by corresponding works.

INDEX.