labourer. I doubt whether, on the whole, a better labouring population, more suited to the climate and country in which they find themselves, is anywhere to be found. The whites certainly cannot do without them; already the great drawback to the Southern States is the want of that great influx of foreign population which causes the North and West to progress in a geometrical ratio. Evidently their true policy is to make the most of the excellent population which they have, and they quite see it. The blacks, again, certainly cannot do without the whites; their own race is not sufficiently advanced to fulfil the functions now in the hands of the whites.

Newly-educated classes, among races hitherto kept down, are apt to over-estimate their own acquirements and powers; that is the tendency of the educated Hindoos of Calcutta and Bombay, and the same tendency shows itself among the educated mulattos and blacks in America. It is scarcely surprising that they should chafe against the social ostracism of all who have dark blood in their veins, and should long for a Utopia in which educated coloured men own no superior; but I think they are entirely wrong in preaching as they now do to their countrymen the advantages of emigration to Liberia-which, however, they do not themselves practise. Probably there could be no more notable example of the want of practical ability in these men, than their management of the last exodus from Charleston to Liberia. The whole thing was a purely coloured movement, and the management was in coloured hands. It seems to

have been terribly mismanaged; and the result was that, after much loss and suffering on the voyage, some of the best of the coloured people who had accumulated money enough to set them up most comfortably in farms of their own in America, were drained of everything they possessed for the expenses of the voyage, and landed in a country where they could earn as labourers about half what they could in their native America, the cost of living being also infinitely dearer. My advise would certainly be-to the blacks in America, 'Stay at home, and make the best of an excellent situation,'--to the whites, 'Do all you can to keep these people, conciliate them, and make the most of them.' I am confident that this may and will be done, if only political difficul ties and unsettlements do not mar the prospect, and in this view I must now look at the political situation.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE SOUTH.

The population of the principal Southern States may be roughly stated to be about half black and half white; that is, putting aside Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and such intermediate States. Of the firstmentioned States the blacks are in a considerable majority in South Carolina and one or two more; in the others the whites are somewhat more numerous. Before the war the blacks were almost all slaves. I think the idea prevalent in Europe was that the

Southern whites were composed of an aristocracy of slave-owning gentlemen, refined and polished, with their dependent slave-drivers, and a large number of very inferior whites, known as 'mean whites,' 'white trash,' and so on, who were rather an encumbrance than otherwise. It seems to me that this view is not justified. The population was very much divided geographically; there was the great black belt on the lower lands, where a few whites ruled over a large slave population; and there was a broad upper belt in the hilly country, where the great bulk of the population was white, mostly small farmers owning their land. No doubt education was much more backward in the South than in the North, and the people were probably less pushing; but I have been very favourably impressed by these Southern whites, måny of whom are of Scotch-Irish (i. e., Northern Presbyterian Irish) or Highland Scotch blood; they seemed to be a handsome, steady, industrious people; and if somewhat primitive in their ways, and humble in the character of their houses and belongings, they are curiously self-supporting and independent of the outer world; they raise their own food, and to this day their wives weave their clothes from their own wool and cotton; and, if not rich, they have few wants. There is, no doubt, in all these Southern States a large intermediate zone in which white and black are much intermixed; but even there they are a good deal aggregated in patchwork fashion, the general rule apparently being that the rich slaveowners have occupied the best lands, and the

poorer

independent whites the poorer lands, especially much of what are called 'pine barrens,' though they are not so barren after all. A notable population in this latter country is the settlement of Scotch Highlanders who came over after 'the '45,' Flora Macdonald being one of them. I am told that not only do they speak Gaelic to this day, but the few black slaves they had among them spoke Gaelic too. In truth, then, I gather that the population of very inferior whites without property never was very large. There were very many without slave property, but most had more or less land. The chief justification for attributing lowness and meanness to the poorer whites seems to be, that some of the inferior central tracts are occupied by a set of people said to be descended from the convicts sent out in former days, and to this day very unthrifty. They are called Sandhillers in South Carolina, and really do seem to be an infe rior people.

The changes favouring small farmers have tended to improve on the whole the condition of those Southern whites who have any sort of property, the losses of the war and the bad times notwithstanding; but mere labourers, probably, feel the competition of free black labour more than formerly. I saw at places black and white labourers working together at the same work, and on the same wages, in a way which, to our Indian ideas of the dignity of the white race, is somewhat distressing. But I did not detect anything specially bad or degraded about these whites; and in the Southern cotton mills (very prosperous

and growing establishments), where the whites have a monopoly of the employment, they are very good workers, the women especially being, apparently, as good as anywhere-the men not so good.

The real weakness of the Southern party during the war was neither any want of gallantry on the part of the slave-owning classes, nor any active disaf fection on the part of the blacks, but the entire want of sympathy for and zeal in the war on the part of the majority of the white population owning no slaves, who considered it a slave-owners' war for the maintenance of slavery. It is surprising to find how many, even of the upper classes, say that they were against secession and war, and only went with their State' when war was inevitable; but having gone into it, the whole of that class, and all connected with them-professional men, doctors, lawyers, and every one else--went into it with a will, and sus tained losses such as, perhaps, no civilised people ever bore before. So long as they were successful there was little active opposition by the poorer whites; but the conscription and other burdens to support a slaveowners' war became very severe, the whites not interested in that cause became recalcitrant, some went into active opposition; and at last it was more desertion and disunion than anything else that brought about the final overthrow.

After the war the results of the victory were summed up in the three famous amendments to the Constitution known as the 13th, 14th, and 15th, comprising the abolition of slavery, equal privileges for