Would we might see, as did the saint of old,
    The heavens opening, and the starry throng
  Listening to have our tale of peace be told,
    That they may hymn man’s resurrection song!

DESPERATION AND COLONIZATION.

As the war rolls on, and as the prospects of Federal victory increase, the greater becomes the anxiety to know what must be done to secure our conquests.  How shall we reestablish the Union in its early strength?  How shall we definitely crush the possibility of renewed rebellion?  The tremendous taxation which hangs over us gives fearful meaning to these questions.  And they must be answered promptly and practically.

The impossibility of Southern independence was from the first a foregone conclusion to all who impartially studied the geography of this country and the social progress of its inhabitants.  The West, with its growing millions vigorously working out the problem of free labor, and of Republicanism, will inevitably control the Mississippi river and master the destinies of all soil above the so-called isothermal line, and probably of much below it.  The cotton States, making comparatively almost no increase in population, receiving no foreign immigration, and desiring none, have precipitated, by war, their destined inferiority to the North.  It has been from the beginning, only a question of time, when they should become the weaker, and goaded by this consciousness, they have set their all upon a throw, by appeal to wager of battle, and are losing.  It is not a question of abolitionism, for it would have been brought on without abolition.  It is not a question of Southern wrongs, for the South never had a right disturbed; and in addition to controlling our Government for years, and directly injuring our manufactures, it long swallowed a disproportionably great share of government appointments, offices, and emoluments.  It is simply the last illustration in history of a smaller and rebellious portion of a community forced by the onward march of civilization into subordination to the greater.  The men of the South were first to preach Manifest Destiny and the subjugation of Cuba and Mexico—­forgetting that as regarded civilization, they themselves, on an average, only filled an intermediate station between the Spanish Creole and the truly white man of the North.  Before manifest destiny can overtake the Mexican, it must first overtake the Southerner.

Despite all its external show of elan, courtesy, and chivalry, ’the South,’ as it exists, is and ever must be, in the very great aggregate, inferior to the North in the elements of progress, and in nearly all that constitutes true superiority.  They boast incessantly of their superior education and culture; but what literature or art has this education produced amid their thousands of ladies and gentlemen of taste and of leisure?  The Northern editor of any literary magazine who has had any experience in by-gone days