an amusing blunder, but illustrates the fact that more and more even the Southern editor is coming to feel the importance of Northern criticism.  It is a very hopeful sign.  It is sometimes said that time will settle these monstrous inequalities that prevail in the South, but time never settles anything.  Mischievous forces only increase in power, the longer they are permitted to operate.  There must be set in operation beneficent forces, in order to make the element of time useful.  Agitation is needed, patriotic, prayerful agitation, and such united effort as was made in these Boston pulpits, helps in this agitation.

The new book which comes from the pen of G.W.  Cable, under the title of “The Negro Question,” puts old truth in a new dress, and renders it more attractive and presentable.  If any man has the right to write upon this “Negro Question,” it is Mr. Cable.  If I had to prepare a liturgy for the Congregational churches, I would put in it the following petition:  “From the superficial views and misleading statements of tourists through the South, or those who reside in a single locality, good Lord, deliver us!” Mr. Cable is not of either of these classes.  He speaks from an intimate acquaintance with, and a long residence in, the South; better than this, he is familiar with the whole territory, and not with a single locality simply.  This little book ought to be in the hands of every conscientious student of this Southern problem.  Take a single quotation: 

“To be governed merely by instincts is pure savagery.  All civilization is the result of subordinating instinct to reason, and to the necessities of peace, amity and righteousness.  To surrender to instinct, would destroy all civilization in three days.  If, then, the color-line is the result of natural instincts, the commonest daily needs of the merest civilization require that we should ask ourselves, is it better or worse to repress or cherish this instinct, and this color-line?” There are forces at work, regenerative and ennobling, that will lead the Southern white people to be ashamed of their attitude toward the Negroes, and not the least of these are the life and works of Mr. Cable.

A letter came into my hand, when I was in the South, which is not only a commentary, but also throws a ray of sunlight where there is much darkness.  It was a letter from an old mistress to her former slave.  He is now a successful business man in Chattanooga.  This earnest, Christian woman, rising above her prejudices, wrote her former slave a cordial invitation to visit her in her home.  Her husband, his old master, had died in the Confederate service.  She had seen her servants taken away from her through the success of the Union armies.  Her property had been depleted, and her fertile plantation overrun by the loyal troops.  It must have been with great sadness and a bitter heart, that she looked out upon this ruin, wrought as she believed, throughout the invading of the sacred soil of Virginia.  But in