Few of us, even now, have a “realizing sense,” as it is called, of the strength of the States’ Rights feeling among the Southern people.  Of all the Southern States in which we ever sojourned, the one that seemed to us most like a Northern State was North Carolina.  We stayed some time at Raleigh, ten years ago, during the session of the Legislature, and we were struck with the large number of reasonable, intelligent, upright men who were members of that body.  Of course, we expected to find Southern men all mad on one topic; but in the Legislature of North Carolina there were several individuals who could converse even on that in a rational and comfortable manner.  We were a little surprised, therefore, the other day, to pick up at a book-stall in Nassau Street a work entitled: 

     “The North Carolina Reader, Number III.  Prepared with
     Special Reference to the Wants and Interests of North
     Carolina.  Under the Auspices of the Superintendent of Common
     Schools.  Containing Selections in Prose and Verse.  By C.H. 
     Wiley.  New York:  A.S.  Barnes and Burr.”

The acute reader will at once surmise that the object of this series of school readers was to instil into the minds of the youth of North Carolina a due regard for the sacredness and blessed effects of our peculiar institution.  But for once the acute reader is mistaken.  No such purpose appears, at least not in Number III.; in which there are only one or two even distant allusions to that dread subject.  Onesimus is not mentioned; there is no reference to Ham, nor is there any discourse upon long heels and small brains.  The great, the only object of this Reader was to nourish in the children of the State the feeling which the boy expressed-when he proudly said that his country was South Carolina.  Nothing can exceed the innocent, childlike manner in which this design is carried out in Number III.  First, the children are favored with a series of chapters descriptive of North Carolina, written in the style of a school geography, with an occasional piece of poetry on a North Carolina subject by a North Carolina poet.  Once, however, the compiler ventures to depart from his plan by inserting the lines by Sir William Jones, “What constitutes a State?” To this poem he appends a note apologizing for “breaking the thread of his discourse,” upon the ground that the lines were so “applicable to the subject,” that it seemed as if the author “must have been describing North Carolina.”  When the compiler has done cataloguing the fisheries, the rivers, the mountains, and the towns of North Carolina, he proceeds to relate its history precisely in the style of our school history books.  The latter half of the volume is chiefly occupied by passages from speeches, and poems from newspapers, written by natives of North Carolina.  It is impossible for us to convey an idea of the innutritiousness and the inferiority of most of these pieces.  North Carolina is the great theme of orator and poet.