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rb, that he who went out for wool may come back shorn. Alas for Nott and Gliddon! Thrice alas for Bishop Hopkins! With slavery they lose their hold on the last clue by which human reason could find its way to a direct proof of the benevolence of God and the plenary inspiration of Scripture. All that we have learned of the blacks during the war makes the plan of arming a part of them to help maintain the master's tyranny over the rest seem so futile, and the arguments urged against it by Mr. Gholson and Mr. Hunter are so convincing, that we can hardly persuade ourselves that the authors of it did not intend it to make the way easier, not to independence, but to reunion. It is said to argue desperation on the part of the chief conspirators at Richmond, and it undoubtedly does; but we see in what we believe to be the causes of their despair something more hopeful than the mere exhaustion it indicates. It is simply incredible that the losses of a four years' war should have drained the fighting men of a population of five millions, or anything like it; and the impossibility of any longer filling the Rebel armies even by the most elaborate system of press-gangs proves to our mind that the poorer class of whites have for some reason or other deserted the cause of the wealthy planters. The men are certainly there, but they have lost all stomach for fighting. Here again we see something which is likely to make a final settlement more easy than it would have been even a year ago. Though the fact that so large a proportion of the Southern people cannot read makes it harder to reach them, yet our soldiers have circulated among them like so many Northern newspapers, and it is impossible that this intercourse, which has been constant, should not have suggested to them many ideas of a kind which their treacherous guides would gladly keep from them. The frantic rage of Southern members of Congress against such books as Helper's can be explained only by their fear lest their poorer constituents should be set a-thinking, for the notion of corrupting a field-hand by an Abolition document is too absurd even for a Wigfall or a Charleston editor. Here, then, are two elements of a favorable horoscope for our future; an acknowledgment of the human nature of the negro by the very Sanhedrim of the South, thus removing his case from the court of ethics to that of political economy; and a suspicion on the part of the Southern majority that s
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