tbook for cadets at West Point, Rawle's "View of the
Constitution," a book which teaches that the Union is dissoluble. Robert
E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, were, therefore, in all probability, given
this book as students at West Point, and consequently, if we would have
honest history, we must face the astonishing fact that there is evidence
to show _that they learned the doctrine of secession at the United
States Military Academy_.

Colonel Bingham, who, it may be remarked, served with distinction in the
Confederate Army, has very kindly supplemented, in a letter to me, his
published statements. He writes:

Secession was legal _theoretically_, but practically the conditions
on which the thirteen Independent Republics, covering a little
strip on the Atlantic coast, came to an agreement, could not
possibly be applied to the great inter-Oceanic Empire into which
these thirteen Independent Republics had developed.

"Theory is a good horse in the stable, but may make an arrant jade
on the journey"--to paraphrase Goldsmith--and the only way in which
these irreconcilable differences could be settled was by bullet and
bayonet, which settled them right and finally.

Once such matters as these are fully understood in the North, there will
be left but one grave issue between North and South, that issue being
over the question of whether or not Southerners, under any
circumstances, use the phrase "you-all" in the singular.

"Whatever you write of the South," said our hostess at a dinner party in
Virginia, "don't make the mistake of representing any one from this paht
of the country, white oh black, educated oh ignorant, as saying
'you-all' meaning one person only."

When I remarked mildly that it seemed to me I had often seen the phrase
so used in books, and heard it in plays, eight or ten southern ladies
and gentlemen at the table pounced upon me, all at once. "Yes!" they
agreed, with a kind of polite violence, "books and plays by Yankees!"

"If," one of the gentlemen explained, "you write to a friend who has a
family, and say, according to the northern practice, 'I hope to see you
when you come to my town,' you write something which is really
ambiguous, since the word 'you' may refer only to your friend, or may
refer also to his family. Our southern 'you-all' makes it explicit."

I told him that in the North we also used the word "all" in connection
with "you," though we accente