tem of cultivation is so scientific, and necessarily conducted on so large a scale, that the large plantations must be kept up, or the crop will fail. At the same time, the labor is so hard and disagreeable, that the colored people, the only persons who can live upon them, will refuse to remain. These are the reasons alleged; and time only can show how far they are correct. For ourselves, we have entire faith in competition, as the great influence which is to make men out of the slaves; and we have no doubt that high wages will always command labor enough. The staple is too valuable: a monopoly of the best rice in the market is a source of wealth not to be lightly thrown away. Through much toil and suffering, through the most fearful ravages of war, and the wholesale impoverishment of her citizens, with diminished population, diminished wealth, and in the humiliation of an insufferable pride, South Carolina commences her new career as one of the United States. She has learned a bitter lesson. She has been forced to recant her favorite doctrine of State Rights, to surrender her favorite institution of slavery, and to return to the sisterhood that she once spurned. We believe she will take the lesson to heart, and will act in good faith; so that a heartier Union than has ever existed heretofore will spring out of these dissensions. If there was any one sentiment that at first spurred her on to war, it was contempt for the Yankees. That is all over now, -forgotten in a gallant contest of four years; and a friendly intercourse is going on such as has never taken place before. We have great faith in the healing power of Time, and look to see this intercourse continue and increase, until we have once again the cordial feeling that existed when South Carolina gave her vote for John Adams, and Massachusetts hers for Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. 56. &. Badzu. ART. VI.-HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE. THERE is a certain timeliness in the publication of the memoir Mrs. Mann has recently given to the world. War gives place to the works of peace: Massachusetts plants the statue of the educator in front of her State House; and a circular from the West announces the re-animation of that institution Mr. Mann gave his life to establish. The stirring pages of the book itself must impress upon all readers the rapidity with which our history is making, and the dependence of that history on the work done by schools and churches among the common people, especially at the West. When we read to-day those letters from Washington, written fifteen years ago, full of the Wilmot Proviso, the 7th of March Speech, the Fugitive-slave Bill, and they bring back to our spirits that cloud of apprehension so oppressive then, we lift our eyes with a sort of incredulous joy to see. half a million emancipators marching home from the South, the light of victory striking along the glad faces they turn northward, their banners, as they pass through Washington, saluting the statue of Liberty that crowns the dome of the Capitol. Mr. Mann indeed foresaw the strife. He wrote, "I think part of the South will rebel:" and again, "Dark clouds overhang the future; and that is not all, they are full of lightning." But did he foresee such a strife and such a victory? Could he, with all his faith in man, have believed that, where he was then defending Drayton and Sayres, we should to-day have our Freedmen's Bureau, and be debating the question of the freedman's ballot? As we look back and around, we may well perceive, that the web of history does not lose its brilliancy as time unrolls it, but that life is to-day so condensed and rapid as to blunt all the sensibilities that perceive it; and that, as Mr. Mann said then, "We are yet too near to take a view of the Olympian vastness of these events." But no reader can fail to see, that, though he was so painfully alive to every movement at Washington, he yet felt the true contest and arena to be in the homes of the people, in the States and Territories themselves. He saw the fact, so prominent for four years past, that our national officers are not rulers but servants, following, rather than leading, the public sentiment; President and Congress being but the executive arm and vocal tongue of the great popular sensorium lying behind them both. Prohibitory clauses in the new constitutions of Oregon and California; antislavery tracts sent out to New Mexico, and printed both in English and Spanish (see Life, p. 294), were better than any words or efforts in Washington; and all his life in Congress but confirmed his judgment as to the importance of that educational work from which he came, and to which he returned. He saw, it was patent in those days to eyes less penetrating than his, — that, if a good man in the capital could mould public sentiment for good, a bad man, an ambitious man, could mould it for evil; he felt that we must rest, not on the precarious virtue of leaders in Washington, where we have many Pierces and Buchanans to one LINCOLN, but on the aggregate virtue and good sense of the home-keeping millions, the true rulers in the Republic. With that frankness which makes the book so charming, Mrs. Mann has told us (p. 403) of the deep emotion with which he severed his relations with New England, on turning his face toward the West. He was indeed leaving "the scenes not only of honest triumph, but of much wounded feeling." He was turning away with a great hope, but also with a certain disappointment in his heart. The most sensitive public man of his time, so conscious of the hallowed nature of his own purposes that he felt personal defeat to be the defeat of righteousness, any failure was to him far more bitter than death. But when was defeat itself so consecrated as when he turned from one scene of conflict to another, from the field to the arena, from disappointment to martyrdom? When Mr. Mann went to Ohio, in 1853, he hoped to plant a great Normal School there in the heart of the country. Ohio 22 VOL. LXXIX.-5TH 8. VOL. XVII. NO. II. had risen, in fifty years, to be the third in population of the federate sisterhood. Illinois, which now stands next to her, if indeed she have not already crowded her out of her place, was then the eighth State below; for that was twelve years ago, and twelve years do the work of a full generation in the West. That midland was just then entering on its period of most astounding development. California's gold had begun to stimulate all internal improvements. Railroads were every. where knitting their prolific iron net; and the farms, finding an outlet for the wealth that gorged them, were opening their incredible stores. Nothing better evinces the growth of that region, than its addition of transportation facilities during the decade then begun. Ohio had then but five hundred miles of railway, where she has three thousand now; Indiana had but two hundred, where she now has two thousand; Illinois had a hundred and ten, where she has three thousand to-day; and there was then but one line of communication between the great lakes and the great rivers, where now those lines strike the Ohio in eight places, and the Mississippi in ten. Though the census of 1860 had not then made its astonishing revelations as to that garden-land lying about the junction of the great rivers, and nobody knew how rapidly the seat of empire was shifting itself into those valleys, Mr. Mann saw what a power would be wielded by him who could make any impress on that nascent civilization. His zeal did not need the announcement of the census, that those States trebled their taxable wealth, and added sixty per cent to their population, in ten years. He felt, that, for the well-being of mankind, the power developing there must be consecrated; and he would have appreciated Mr. Roebuck's frank confession to his constituents. In his letters to Mr. Fay (Life, pp. 365–370), he mentions the unsectarian character of the college, and the admission of women to all its privileges, as the features which drew him to this particular institution. There was no occasion for his avowing the fact, that he hoped to make the college embody his own spirit; to make it, not only the teacher of the teachers, so correcting that ignorance in the West which many ridiculed but few strove to enlighten, but also the home, not so much of science as of virtue, of exemplary life, and the fortress of a cheerful and untrammelled faith. The lecture-room had brought him face to face with the best elements of the Western masses; face to face also with the fact that here were thousands hungering for the speech of men whom, almost everywhere in our country, church and school put under ban, men like Emerson, Parker, Chapin, King, and Mr. Mann himself, who would not be permitted to hold a professorship in any Western college, and who had no means but the lecture-desk of coming in personal contact with the people. What was true then is true now. Colleges there are indeed in the West, Ohio has some thirty of them,with endowments adequate to their opportunity. But their general educational function is subordinated to some sectarian use. They are the engines of an advancing civilization only as its wheels grind in Presbyterian or Baptist ruts. And they. are stunted and malformed by a species of denominational breeding in-and-in. Originating amidst a comparatively illiterate ministry, the stream cannot rise higher than its source. The project is inaugurated, the funds raised, by ministers who illustrate, as well as feel, the popular need of education, but who themselves must furnish forth the Board of Instruction. One, less ignorant or more influential than the rest, is dubbed D.D., and set up as president of the new "University;" and, thereafter, the grade of the school is fixed. The people, in all honesty, believe these men the finest scholars on the Continent, for have they not their own word for it? and any proposals for improvement are regarded as in very bad taste, being virtually open or covert assaults on these eminent men, the fathers, of the denomination. No one can have lived in the West without witnessing the process here described. New-England schoolboys could not credit the ignorance of some eminent ecclesiastics and college officers there; an ignorance not merely as to language, making them literally unable to read a page of any tongue other than English, but as to the simplest facts of natural science, and best known events or characters of history. The writer met, |