s settled North Carolina.

_The Country Gentlemen._--Perhaps one of the most remarkable changes
which we may expect, is one that will soon be apparent on the face of
our country society. The abolition of slavery will do wonders here. It
puts an end to the reign of those lordly-landed proprietors, planters,
and farmers, who constituted so striking and so pleasant a feature in
our rural population. No longer the masters of hundreds of slaves
wherewith to cultivate their thousands of acres, the general cheapness
of lands in the South will prevent their forming around them a system
of dependent tenantry, since every industrious man will be able to
plough his own farm. They will therefore gradually sell off their
paternal acres, no longer within the scope of prudent management, and
seek homes in the towns and villages, or contract their establishments
to their means and altered condition. Agriculture will then pass
gradually into the hands of small farmers, and the great farms will
forever disappear.

I can scarcely imagine it possible for any one to view the steady
disappearance of the race of Southern country gentlemen without
genuine sorrow . . . the high-toned, educated, chivalrous,
intelligent, and hospitable Southern gentlemen, of whom each one who
hears me has at least a dozen in his mind's eye in Virginia and the
Carolinas: whose broad fields were cultivated by their own faithful
and devoted slaves, whose rudely splendid mansions stand where their
fathers reared them, among the oaks and the pines which greeted the
canoe of John Smith, welcomed the ships of Raleigh, and sheltered the
wild cavaliers of De Soto; whose hall doors stood wide open, and were
never shut except against a retreating guest;[30] whose cellar and
table abounded with the richest products of the richest lands in the
world, and whose hospitality was yet unstained by unrefined excess;
whose parlors and fire-sides were adorned by a courtly female grace
which might vie with any that ever lighted and blessed the home of
man; whose hands were taught from infancy to fly open to every
generous and charitable appeal, and whose minds were inured to all
self-respect and toleration, and whose strong brains were sudden death
to humbuggery, all the _isms_, and the whole family of mean and
pestilential fanaticism.

_The Negroes._--There is also a great change at hand for the
negro. . . Who that knew him as a contented, well-treated slave, did
not learn to lov