chance than to logic in vindication of
tarnished honor, and who imagine the blood of a dead friend the only
salve to be relied on for the cure of wounded feelings, killed his
opponent in a duel. The law of Illinois very coolly hanged the
survivor; and from that time to this, other remedies have been found
for spiritual hurts, real or imaginary. Nobody has fancied it
necessary to fight with a noose round his neck. If ever capital
punishment were lawful, (which I confess I do not think it ever can
be,) it would be as a desperate remedy against this horrid relic of
mediaeval superstition and impiety, no wiser or more Christian than
the ordeal by burning ploughshares or poisoned wine. The rope in
judicial hands is certainly as lawful as the pistol in rash ones; so
the duellist has no reason to complain.

Some of the later days of Illinois, the days of Indian wars and Mormon
wars, pro-slavery wars and financial wars, are too red and black for
peaceful pages; and as they were incidental rather than
characteristic, they do not come within our narrow limits. There is
still too large an infusion of the cruel slavery spirit in the laws of
Illinois; but the immense tide of immigration will necessarily remedy
that, by overpowering the influence introduced over the southern
border. So nearly a Southern State was Illinois once considered to be,
that, in settling the northern boundary, it was deemed essential to
give her a portion of the lake-shore, that her interests might be at
least balanced. They have proved to be more than balanced by this wise
provision.

The little excuse there is in this favored region for a sordid
devotion to toil, a journey through the State, even at flying pace, is
sufficient to show. The fertility of the soil is the despair of
scientific farming. Who cares for rules, when he has only to drop a
seed and tread on it, to be sure of a hundred-fold return? Who talks
of succession of crops, when twelve burdens of wheat, taken from the
same soil in as many years, leave the ground black and ready for
another yield of almost equal abundance? An alluvial tract of about
three hundred thousand acres, near the Mississippi, has been
cultivated in Indian corn a hundred and fifty years,--indeed, ever
since the French occupation of Illinois. What of under-draining? Some
forty or fifty rivers threading the State, besides smaller streams
innumerable, always will do that, as soon as the Nilic floods of
spring have accompl