In such an awakening it was inevitable but that literature should share.  And biographies, histories, pictorials, and juveniles, in Europe and America, testify to the general consciousness.  Into this last-named class the little book at the head of this notice modestly essays to enter.  Had it put on airs and spread itself out into the broad-margined and large-lettered octavo, it might have stood in libraries as a worthy compeer of the ablest chronicles.  Such a presentation would not have been beyond its desert, and would have been more consistent with the author’s type of mind.  Yet his simplicity, fidelity, and straightforwardness will make him a better guide to advanced youth than the too prattling habits of mere child-writers.  They ever incline to the baby-talk style of composition,—­“mumming,” as the tavern-woman proposed, the bread and milk which they set before their youthful readers.  “Carleton” ever treats his boy-readers as his intelligent equals, and considers them capable of understanding the common language of books and men.  It is refreshing to read a book for boys that is not, as most of this class are, while pretending to be juvenile, actually senile.

The work opens with the story of the causes of the war, in which the author gives the old and new counterblasters a quid, or, as they will doubtless prefer to call it, a crumb of comfort.  He traces the origin of the war, not to Slavery, but to Tobacco.  The demand for the new drug was general throughout Europe.  Virginia was the main source of supply.  The vagabondish farmers would not labor.  Negroes arrive, and European appetite creates American Slavery.  Two hundred years after, the descendants of these slaveholders fancy that a like European demand for another plant will insure this Slavery a national sovereignty.  Tobacco thus verifies Charles Lamb’s unwilling execration.  It is not Bacchus’s only, but Slavery’s “black servant, negro fine,” and belongs, after all, to that Africa which he says “breeds no such prodigious poison.”  The Union lovers of “the Great Plant” may be called to decide between their country and their cigar.  Will patriotism or the pipe then prevail?  We tremble for our country in that conflict of duty and desire.  It is odd that the two favorite plants of the South should thus be charged with our war.  These innocent leaves and blossoms, babes in the wood, are made the bearers of our iniquities.  Cotton and Tobacco are the white and black representatives of the vegetable races.  Perhaps some fanciful theorist may show from this fact, that not only all the human races, but those of the lower kingdoms, are involved in this struggle, and, as in the greater warfare of Earth and Time, so in this, its condensed type, the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in common with its head and master.