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