must be our motto and our guide, and we can easily learn from history that we can effect this only by erecting great public works that shall be the property of the whole people. The greatest man who ever lived, with all his weaknesses, is a most contemptible thing; but mankind, in the aggregate, is the noblest work of God. Let us worship mankind, but avoid the silly delusion that any one of the species ever got much the start of the rest. A Barnum or a razor-strap man, an Alexander or a Bonaparte, is not a whit the superior to our next door neighbor. Let us despise men while we reverence mankind. Let us respect office and contemn the incumbent. In America, well-paid office, however high, is filled always by the demagogue ;but still it is o ffice, and we must pay respect to office for the sake of the people. Offices, where there is little or no pay, as those of overseers of the poor, justices of the peace, and members of the State legislature, are filled, not by mercenary demagogues but by public-spirited men, who either sacrifice their own good to that of the public, or whose interests are so tied up with those of the people at large, that they take office to advance public interests. Our well-paid officers are paid to betray us, and the whole thing (we mean the federal government) will soon explode.

The South must soon have to take care of itself. The fedcral government was a mere league between small nations, to give them ability to cope with stronger nations. Like all such leagues, it lasts so long as there is a common danger, an outside pressure, and from habit, a little while longer. It is not a government, because it has neither a people nor a territory. It represents nobody, and there is no power within to watch and control it. Government cannot exist "in vacuo." It must be kept moving in its proper orbit by forces "ab extra," or "ab intra." "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?" is a pertinent question as to all governments. Inward or outward necessity-force from within or without-are necessary to all governments. Perpetual motion is as gross an absurdity in the moral as in the physical world. This "wheel within a wheel" is one of the hundred "mare's nests" which our wise ancestors discovered. A war with Mexico and Spain, a new impulse ab extra will keep it going a while longer. But the thing, as a government, is a bald humbug, and we feel it our duty to expose it.

The States have territories and peoples; are nations, and have governments-governments that may readily prepare for any exigency or emergency. 'Tis time to get ready.

Until lately the South has simply been carrying on the work of destruction and exhaustion-making cotton to buy negroes to make cotton to buy negroes again." The entire region from Virginia to Florida, when first visited by Europeans, was the fairest land that ever human eye rested upon. The beautiful bays, rivers, and inlets, lined with noble foresttrees, were alive with fish and wild flowers. The hills, the plains, and the mountains clothed with verdure, rich in wild fruits, redolent with flowers, and canopied with umbrageous trees, the shelter and the home of every variety of game. The white man, the despoiler, came! The forests were felled, the wild fruits and flowers exterminated, the game destroyed, and the lands, by careless and continued cultivation, soon exhausted. Soon, nothing was to be seen but decayed tenements, rotten and fallen enclosures, and bare and exhausted fields. The white man had despoiled what the savage had spared! He had destroyed, erased, obliterated all the loveliness of nature, and erected in its stead no beautiful or durable creations of art. Marching under the banner of free-trade, "let alone," and "every man for himself," he proceeds toward the mountains, exhausts those lands, spreads over the South and South west, still exhausting and destroying, like an army of locusts, as he goes, settles on the Mississippi, in the Northwest, proceeds to the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, still waging war with the bounties of Providence, and exhausting in an age what was made for eternity. 'Tis time to change our policy; to take a new departure; to "Make Home Attractive," instead of making it barren, gloomy, hideous and repulsive.

But we are distrustful of ourselves. We have been taught by Englishmen and Yankees that a Southern clime relaxes mind and body, restrains genius, cramps energy and enterprise, and paralyzes industry. It was not so in ancient times at least. The pyramids of Egypt, the ruins of Thebes, Petrea, Balbec, and Palmyra, the lonely remains of art and architecture in Greece and Italy, the mighty tanks of Ceylon, forty miles in circumference, the exhumed wonders of Nineveh, the massive remains of architecture in Mexico and Central America, and the wonderful achievements of industry in Peru-all belong to warm climates-were all erected by slaveholding nations. Where are the remains of art or industry in the cold regions of the north? and echo answers, where ? Not one! Scarcely a Druid temple, with one rude rock placed above another. There, where art and industry were most

The

needed, none appear. Some attribute it to the absence of slavery-to the want of private ownership of lands. This is all true; but there is a profound truth behind it. Cold climates make men almost irreclaimably savage, inert, and indolent, or they would institute slavery and private ownership of lands-the only means to stimulate into active, continuous industry, and to beget civilization. The hotter the clime the more is man disposed to industry. The facts that sustain this. proposition are overwhelming, and all on one side. Chinese wall is no exception, for the Chinese are a southern people. Within the last few centuries art and industry have been galvanized into a sickly existence at the north; but with them civilization is an exotic. There is nothing in the present to refute the lessons of the past. Man is an animal indigenous only to warm climates. The cotton States will attain the highest civilization; they will hand down to a remote posterity monuments of genius and industry, such as all other Southern people have left behind them. Already they are the most industrious people on earth. Wealth is rapidly accumulating, and that wealth will be liberally poured out to advance art, skill, science, genius, and learning, and to beget and foster a high civilization.

We cannot close without a tribute to the mechanic. 'Tis he, chiefly, who begets, sustains, and advances civilization. He is the first and most truthful historian. His undying works give the impress of the age in which he lived. The monuments of his skill and labor tell the story of a past that existed and flourished thousands of years before historic pen was wielded. In the dark ages, when civilization seemed about to perish, his Gothic spire, reaching heavenward, bid men not despair of a better future. In the midst of those dark ages the Ottoman mechanic reared structures of oriental art in Cordova that wiped off the disgrace from the Ottoman for burning the Alexandrian library. Quitting the most distant past, leaving out the middle ages, and coming down to the present day, we still find the mechanic to be the greatest of human benefactors, the advanced guard in the march of civilization. The steamship and the steam engine are his; the railroad, and all the wonders of engineering art, are his; and the telegraph, the ministering lightning of heaven that encompasses the earth in a moment, is his also.

People of the South! encourage mechanic art, and you will

MAKE HOME ATTRACTIVE!

ART. III.-RELATIONS OF THE NEGRO RACE TO CIVILIZATION.

NEGROES AS ABORIGINES.

WHILE the Rev. Doctors Beecher and Cheever in the North, and Mr. Spurgeon in England, are denouncing us from their pulpits, not following any example set by Christ and his apostles that we are aware of, it becomes us in the South not to be provoked to retaliation, but like reasonable men to study out this great question of slavery in all its bearings. It is childish to hang people in effigy whose opinions do not please us, or to make bonfires of the books of those who differ from us. Let us rather attempt to show by sound arguments that it is not every one claiming the name of philanthropist who has any right to it. In respect of the negro race, we contend that it is the Southern States alone who, without any boast of their humanity, can call themselves the true friends of the negro, since there first, in the history of his race, has he found rest for the sole of his foot, and commenced his upward march toward civilization. On the other hand, we believe that serious study and consideration will convince us that those anxious to rupture the bonds at present uniting master and slave, are acting cruelly toward the black race, to say nothing of the injury they are inflicting on others. And let it here be understood that we are ignoring the interests of the whites altogether; we do not take into account at all what evils may happen to planters, or the commercial world of two hemispheres, by abolition or revolts, which even quiet people in the North are instigating by their erroneous opinions; or, if we do glance at these results, too, it is only collaterally; we write as a philanthropist in the interest of four million negroes.

In previous articles we have endeavored to show, by copious illustrations and facts, that, in whatever part of the globe we find the free negro, he is generally sunken in vice, sloth, and poverty, and in many cases undergoing a more or less rapid process of extinction. We have shown that the arbitrary release of the black race in the West Indies, while it has been an evil to them, has also been the means of reducing to a worse slavery a copper-colored race, and of building up a new slave trade the coolie trade-which in its horrors rivals the worst forms of the old.

But there is another view to take of the negro race, a fair consideration of which, it would seem might arrest for a while the cruel philanthropy of the North: their relations to civilization as aboriginals of the soil-savages. Melancholy as it is, it ap pears to be, at this day, a universal fact that wherever our

rampant civilization comes in contact with barbarous tribes, their fate is rapid EXTINCTION, unless preserved by slavery. It is suprising to look over the globe and see what hecatombs of tribes, and what numbers of populations, have, in the last few centuries, dropped and disappeared unmissed from the array of nations, like falling stars whose disappearance is unnoticed amid the more brilliant galaxy left behind them. The Juggernaut of civilization is now rolling over the earth, invading the lands for centuries cursed by idleness and vice, and on its front, in flaming letters of fire, may be read the words, "EXTINCTION or SLAVERY for all savage tribes ;" "Labor and live, or be idle and die."

Where those savages have been of a docile, timid, slavish nature, they have been reduced to slavery; where they have been fierce, independent, and warlike, they have been exterminated; the South American Indians are an example of the former, and the North American of the latter case. But even of these two alternatives, those, who, by their mental and moral natures, were fitted to be slaves, have generally, in the end, suffered the worse penalty of extermination, owing to their physical weakness. An example of this will occur to every one in the case of the gentle tribes of the West Indies and New Spain, who were destroyed by millions in the early part of the sixteenth century, under the rigors of Spanish slavery; and even the negro, with a physical, as well as a mental and moral nature, fitted for slavery and thriving best under a mild slavery, has, in every case excepting one, been unable to endure the toils and cruelties which have been wantonly heaped upon him. In that one case, the omnipotent power of kindness has made him invaluable, and yielded an ample reward to his masters.

It is further to be remarked that this extermination has generally been decided and rapid, just in proportion to the vigor and elevation of the intrusive civilization which caused it. An energetic and industrious people like the Anglo-Saxons, whenever they colonize a barbarous country, complete the work with frightful rapidity, whereas a people less industrious and more effeminate, are oftentimes hardly a match for barbarism, and indeed are often overcome by it, as has been the case in many of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.

No degree of mercy, no justice, no skill, no powers of gov ernment, seem hitherto to have been able to arrest this extermination of savage tribes. Every expedient that humanity could devise has been adopted by humane nations, but without

success.