several hundred thousands more.  There remain legally enslaved probably less than three quarters of a million,—­chiefly scattered along a narrow border-strip that is coterminous, North and South, with Freedom or Emancipation,—­partly dotted in isolated parishes or counties, surrounded by enfranchised slaves.  Can we maintain in perpetuity so anomalous a condition of things?  Clearly not.  At every step embarrassments innumerable obstruct our progress.  No industry, no human sagacity, would suffice to determine the ten thousand conflicting questions that must arise out of such a chaos.  Must the history of each negro be followed back, so as to determine his status, whether slave or free?  If negroes emancipated in insurrectionary States are sold as slaves into Border States, or into excepted parishes or counties, can we expect to trace the transaction?  If slaves owned in Border States, or in excepted parishes or counties, are sold to loyal men in insurrectionary States, are they still slaves? or do they become free?  Are we to admit, or to deny, the constitutionality of Border-State laws, which arrest, and imprison as vagrants, and sell into slavery to pay expenses of arrest and imprisonment, free negro emigrants from insurrectionary States?[11] But why multiply instances?  The longer this twilight of groping transition lasts, it will be only confusion the worse confounded.

[Footnote 11:  If, hereafter, Attorney-General Bates’s decision, that a free negro is a citizen, be sustained by the Supreme Court, then, should the question come up before it, the State laws above referred to will be declared unconstitutional.  But meanwhile they have not been so declared, and are in force.

    The negro-excluding laws of Indiana and Illinois are in the same
    category.]

We cannot stand still.  Shall we recede?  We break faith solemnly plighted; we submit, before the world, to base humiliation; we bow down to a system which the voice of all Christendom condemns; we abandon the struggle for nationality, and consent, for ages, perhaps, to a dismembered country.  Shall we advance?  There is but one path—­the plain, truth-lighted, onward path—­to victory and to peace.

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Substance and Shadow:  or, Morality and Religion in their Relation to Life. An Essay on the Physics of Creation.  By HENRY JAMES.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields.

Any one tolerably conversant with either the religion or the philosophy of the last twenty-five years, as displayed in the current literature, must have been convinced that both had left their ancient moorings, never again to find them, and were floating about perilously in quest of a new anchorage.  We read the “Essays and Reviews” and “The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua critically Examined,” and the replications long-drawn-out from High Church