muscle of the Rebellion-were there. Some one has remarked (perhaps ARTEMUS WARD) that the Pilgrim Fathers came over to this country to secure freedom of conscience and keep every body else from enjoying the same blessings.

The Scotch-Irishman has some of the same metal in him. The very spirit of resistance to any thing even called by the name of "coercion" is born in him.

People of New England and Pennsylvania ancestry, and from all the older states of the North, resided in the South before the war. The same race that pitched the tea overboard in Boston harbor and signed the Declaration of Independence was there. Save that they were educated under a different social system at the South, and that the climate was perhaps a little more heating to blood and brains, the Southern people did not differ from their American brethren at the North. The great loved PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN and JEFFERSON DAVIS were born in neighboring counties of Kentucky.

No one can be long in the South without realizing the unanimity of sentiment regarding the war that must have prevailed in the old slave-holding districts after serious hostilities begun. The exceptions were rare. He can not fail to realize that the soldiers of the South were sincere in their convictions of duty, and in their allegiance to their section. Men insincere or actuated by merely passionate impulses, or unworthy or base motives, have never shown such courage and fidelity.

The men who served in the Confederate army are among the best citizens of the South. In the main, they and their children compose the educated and conservative classes. No ex-Federal soldier or gentleman from the North can reside there without being brought into intimate relations with them. They have engaged in the earnest duties

of life with the faithfulness exhibited by the Union soldiers. The privations of war, the lessons of victory and defeat, the experiences of many campaigns, association with each other and with strangers, have had an educating and liberalizing effect upon them. The average ex-Confederate has little time for partisan politics. He is minding his own business. There is nothing small about him. The old Johnny Reb usually salutes the old Blue Coat with a kind and hearty greeting. They generally become friends. Ostracism and discourtesy as a rule are unknown among people who understand the civilities of life, and have some respect for the opinion of others. The individual who is so constituted that he can not be comfortable away from home excepting among people entirely of his own way of thinking, especially upon subjects political and social, will occasionally find himself, or imagine himself, in a reasonable amount of hot water at the South or North-in fact, anywhere else.

After a liberal experience in knocking about the world, I can justly say, looking from a standpoint above all political or local considerations, that the traveler or immigrant from the North will find no heartier welcome or people of more hospitable or generous impulses than in the South of to-day. To be justly appreciated they must be known at their firesides, in their churches, in their business relations, and not entirely through their own public journals, whose occasional passionate expressions are heralded at the North.

I may say also that the traveler and immigrant may sometimes find other kinds of people there. All the good people are not huddled together in any one section. In the war time, I once caught one of my soldiers in a very compromising predicament, trying to smother a lot of squalling chickens under his big army coat.

When I pressed him for an explanation, finding other

defenses failing him, he fell back on the original sin defense, and insisted that I couldn't expect the whole regiment to be Christians; that there was bound to be some d-n rascals like him in a big regiment.

The South is no exception to this general rule. There are blank rascals and original sinners down there. There are also people, kind and good neighbors, who seem to think loyalty to the South means excessive partisanship. One of the leading public journals of my own section in Tennessee which, in the absence of opposition journals, might wield a vast conservative influence for good, chooses rather, upon all political and sectional issues, to express itself in the language of extreme partisanship, even bitterness, thus misleading public sentiment and practically misrepresenting the majority element of a fraternal city. We have a learned supreme judge in Tennessee who seems to take special pride in declaring to public assemblies throughout the state that the right of secession was one of the most sacred principles implanted by the fathers in the federal constitution. His surprising utterances are sometimes printed at the North, yet the soldiers of the Confederacy as a class are to-day thoroughly loyal to the idea, and the supreme necessity of the union of the states. They are wise enough to know and frank enough to admit that whatever of greatness or strength or hope belongs to our common country, rest mainly upon this

basis.

Occasionally, you might find some old time reb, from away out in the woods, with his horse hitched to a saloon post, telling the bystanders very confidentially that he “would like to have just one more whack at the Yankees;" but if you should meet the same old "gray back" the next day, he would probably slap you on the shoulder and tell you as one told me, "that a new generation of fools

would have to be born in the South before they would ever get caught in another such a scrape."

Partisans belong to all climates and countries. They flourish at the North. Their intemperate expressions are often paraded by the journals of the South. Each side seems to rejoice in making public the sins of the other. It is, in fact, sometimes difficult, except by personal acquaintance, for the people of the two sections to realize the kindly feeling that really lies in the heart of each toward the other.

This presumed antagonism is a national misfortune. It does not represent actual facts. It sets up the imaginary for the real. It excites friction and distrust where no vital. danger or real disloyalty to the country or to each other exists, and where there should be only co-operation and mutual sympathy.

It is unfortunate that no political issues have become of sufficient importance since the war to overshadow the problems that still divide the population of the South upon mere lines of color. It is unfortunate that the great body of wealth and intelligence of the South should be arrayed upon one side only of this line. The humbler and ignorant classes thus often lose the benefit of wise and conservative counsels and associations and become a prey to evil influA single political organization holds almost supreme sway. The public press nearly always represents the same side of all political questions. Such conditions naturally promote partisanship and are apt to lead to injustice and oppression.

ences.

After two centuries of slavery the reorganization of the social, industrial, and political forces of the South must of necessity be slow. To the credit of this institution, it must be conceded that the negroes of the South are more civil

ized and christianized than any considerable body of the African race in their native land or elsewhere. In their new estate, they are making gradual but steady advances toward a better citizenship.

Their condition in the section in which I reside may serve as an illustration. Nashville is a typical city of the central South, nearly as large as Toledo. Of its seventy-six thousand five hundred inhabitants by the new census, about one-third are colored. At the close of the war the majority of the older class of colored people were field hands. As a rule they were much less intelligent than the colored population of the North.

We have an excellent, well organized state and municipal school system, the benefits of which inure to whites and blacks in proportion to their numbers. More than three thousand colored pupils regularly attend the free public schools of Nashville throughout the scholastic year. The colored tax-payers pay about one-thirtieth of the taxes, and their children receive the benefits of about one-third of the large public school fund. There are three large colleges in Nashville-one of them dignified with the name of a university-exclusively devoted to the higher education and manual training of the colored race. These useful institutions have been erected and largely supported by Northern missionary aid, and are attended by about fourteen hundred pupils, many of them from other Southern states. There are also other smaller schools for the education of colored children, apart from the public schools.

Faithful men from the North and South, men of good courage, high character, and practical judgment, are devoting their lives to the education and elevation of the colored race, not only in my city, but in most sections of the South.