Mental arithmetic and the use of fractions were taught daily.  The use of the decimal in the American coinage is of great advantage; it is easier and more intelligible to children than the clumsy old system of pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings.  It is a system which would no doubt have been long ago adopted by England, if it had not been humiliating to our national pride to take even a good thing from rebellious Yankees, and inferior Latin races.  We cling fondly to absurdities because they are our own.  In Australia wild rabbits are vermin, in England they are private property; and if one of the three millions of her miserable paupers is found with a rabbit in each of his coat pockets, he is fined 10s. or sent to gaol.  Pope Gregory XIII. demonstrated the error of the calendar then in use, and all Catholic nations adopted his correction.  But when the adoption of the calendar was proposed in Parliament, John Bull put his big foot down at once; he would receive no truth, not even a mathematical one, from the Pope of Rome, and it was only after the lapse of nearly 200 years, when the memory of Gregory and his calendar had almost faded away from the sensitive mind of Protestantism, that an Act was passed, “equalising the style in Great Britain and Ireland with that used in other countries of Europe.”

A fugitive slave with his wife and daughter came to Joliet.  One day he was seized by three slave-hunters, who took him towards the canal.  A number of abolitionists assembled to rescue the slave, but the three men drew their revolvers, and no abolitionist had the courage to fire the first shot.  The slave was put in a canal boat and went south; his wife remained in Joliet and earned her bread by weaving drugget; the daughter came to my school; she was of pure negro blood, but was taught with the white girls.

The abolitionists were increasing in number, and during the war with the South the slaves were freed.  They are now like Israel in Egypt, they increase too rapidly.  If father Abraham had sent them back to Africa when they were only four millions, he would have earned the gratitude of his country.  Now they number more than eight millions; the Sunny South agrees with their constitution; they work as little and steal as much as possible.  In the days of their bondage they were addicted to petty larceny; now they have votes, and when they achieve place and power they are addicted to grand larceny, and they loot the public treasury as unblushingly as the white politicians.

The nigger question has doubled in magnitude during the last thirty years, and there will have to be another abolition campaign of some kind.  The blacks are incapable of ruling the whites; no time was given to educate them for their new duties, if teaching them was possible; the Declaration of Independence was in their case a mockery from the beginning.  When all the old abolitionists and slave-holders are dead, another generation of men grown wiser by the failure of the policy of their forefathers may solve the black problem.