One legal brilliant blazes on the forehead of youthful Illinois, in the shape of a summary remedy for duelling.  One of those heroes who think it safer to appeal to 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 accomplished their work by floating to the surface the finest part of the soil.  Irrigation?  You may now grow rice on one farm and grapes on another, without travelling far between.  It is true, there must be an end to this universality of power and advantage, some day; but nobody can see far enough ahead to feel afraid, and it is not in the spirit of our time to