we shall address to
them because the conclusion is a little humiliating. In their case, we
shall have little need to concern ourselves about the wishes of a local
majority. The fact that a majority are blacks, to begin with, must
deprive that consideration of all its force, even to their own
apprehension. It will not be the first time that they have received a
benefit which did not agree with the wishes of the greater part of those
upon whom it was bestowed. The men of Rhode Island and Massachusetts who
achieved the independence of South Carolina did not stop to consider
whether a majority of her white inhabitants were Tories.

When we hear that the colonel of a regiment of Secessionists sends a
flag of truce to Fort Monroe to ask for the return of his fugitive
slaves under the Constitution and laws of the United States, a painful
doubt must be suggested whether such gentlemen really believe themselves
to be so wholly and utterly out of the Union as the theory of Secession
would indicate. And when the novel, but very sensible doctrine with
which that singular demand was met, that slaves are to be regarded as
articles contraband of war, chattels capable of a military use, a kind
of locomotive gun-carriages and intrenching-tools, and as such to be
taken and confiscated when found belonging to armed rebels, shall have
been practically applied for a time, with its natural and obvious
result, it may be that even the Palmetto State will exhibit some general
symptoms of returning reason.

THEODORE WINTHROP.

Theodore Winthrop's life, like a fire long smouldering, suddenly blazed
up into a clear, bright flame, and vanished. Those of us who were his
friends and neighbors, by whose firesides he sat familiarly, and of
whose life upon the pleasant Staten Island, where he lived, he was so
important a part, were so impressed by his intense vitality, that his
death strikes us with peculiar strangeness, like sudden winter-silence
falling upon these humming fields of June.

As I look along the wooded brook-side by which he used to come, I should
not be surprised, if I saw that knit, wiry, light figure moving with
quick, firm, leopard tread over the grass,--the keen gray eye, the
clustering fair hair, the kind, serious smile, the mien of undaunted
patience. If you did not know him, you would have found his greeting a
little constrained,--not from shyness, but from genuine modesty and
the habit of society. You would have rema