much
so as any pigs--and that, too, by eminently aristocratic and highly
refined scions of first families. Now that we can and dare speak the
truth, it is not amiss to do so. We recall the day when to have taken
part in the charge of the Six Hundred would have been a trifle of
bravery compared to making the above truthful statement--for any one who
valued social standing, or indeed a whole skin--on the border. Whether
their own children were sold may be imagined from an anecdote long
current in Virginia, relative to ex-Governor Wise, who, in a certain law
case where he was opposed by a Northern trader, decided of a certain
slave, that the chattel, being a mulatto, was of more value than 'a
molangeon.' 'And what, in the name of God, _is_ a molungeon?' inquired
the astonished 'Northern man.' 'A _mulatto_,' replied Wise, is the child
of a female house-servant by young master'--a molungeon is the offspring
of a field hand by a Yankee peddler.'

Mr. Cairnes has, we doubt not, often heard of mulattoes--they constitute
the great majority of Virginia slaves. But did he ever hear of
'molungeons'?

Mr. Cairnes justly denies the common theory that the South has
maintained paramount political sway in the Union by a superior capacity
for politics. He declares that men whose interests and ideas are
concentrated in a very narrow range, on one object, have vast advantage
over their intellectual superiors, when the latter pursue no such single
course. He might have added that the young Southern gentleman, when not
intended for a physician, almost invariably devotes to mere provincial
politics and the arts of declamation and debate, all of those
intellectual energies which the Northerner applies to business, art,
commerce, literature, and other solidly useful occupations. If the
Southerner has an inborn superior _talent_ for politics, why is it that,
as in the case of British or French statesmen, he never develops the
slightest talent for _literature_? So notoriously is this the case, that
even the first writers of the South, especially for the press, are
generally broken-down Northern literary hacks, or miserable Irish and
English refugees. Mr. Cairnes quotes De Bow's _Review_. He might be
amazed, could he examine a number of that remarkable periodical, at the
quality of the English written by some of the most eminent philosophers,
patriots, and politicians of the confederacy!

The history of the Slave Power, as set forth in Louisia