with the manuscripts of the chivalry, will shrug his shoulders with a smile as he recalls the reams of reechoes of Northern writers, and not unfrequently of mere ‘sensation’ third-rate writers at that, which he was wont to receive from Dixie.  And amid all his vaunts and taunts, the consciousness of this intellectual inferiority never left the Southerner.  It stimulated his hatred—­it rankled in his heart.  He might boast or lie—­and his chief statistician, De Bow, was so notoriously convicted of falsifying facts and figures that the assertion, as applied to him, is merely historical—­but it was of no avail.  The Northern school and the Northern college continued to be the great fountain of North-American intellect, and the Southerner found himself year by year falling behind-hand intellectually and socially as well as numerically.  As a last resort, despairing of victory in the real, he plunged after the wild chivalric dream of independence; of Mexican and Cuban conquest; of an endless realm and a reopened slave-trade—­or at least of holding the cotton mart of the world.  It is all in vain.  We of the same continent recognize no right in a very few millions to seize on the land which belongs as much to our descendants and to the labor of all Europe and of the world as it does to them.  They have no right to exclude white labor by slaves.  A Doughface press may cry, Compromise; and try to restore the status quo ante bellum, but all in vain.  The best that can be hoped for, is some ingenious temporary arrangement to break the fall of their old slaveholding friends.  It is not as we will, or as we or you would like, that what the Southerners themselves term a conflict of races, can be settled.  People who burn their own cities and fire their own crops are going to the dire and bitter end; and the Might which under God’s providence is generally found in the long run of history to be the Right—­will triumph at last.

As has been intimated in the foregoing passages, the antipathy of the South to the North is deeply seated, springing from such rancor as can only be bred between a claim to social superiority mingled with a bitter consciousness of inferiority in nearly all which the spirit of the age declares constitutes true greatness.  It is almost needless to say, that with such motives goading them on, with an ignorant, unthinking mass for soldiers, and with unprincipled politicians who have to a want of principle added the newly acquired lust for blood, any prospect of conciliation becomes extremely remote.  We may hope for it—­we may and should proceed cautiously, so that no possible opportunity of restoring peace may be lost; but it is of the utmost importance that we be blind to no facts; and every fact developed as the war advances seems to indicate that we have to deal with a most intractable, crafty, and ferocious enemy, whom to trust is to be deceived.