A SUGGESTION TO THE NORTH.

"Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert even the natural taste and relish of equity and justice.

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By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in a hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very names of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity whilst we agreed, become new incentives to hatred and rage, when the communion of our country is dissolved.

"We may flatter ourselves that we we shall not fall into this misfortune. But we have no charter of exemption, that I know of, from the ordinary frailties of our nature.

"I know many have been taught to think that moderation, in a case like this, is a sort of treason; and that all arguments for it are sufficiently answered by railing at rebels and rebellion, and by charging all the present or future miseries which we may suffer, on the resistance of our brethren.

"But I would wish them, in this grave matter, and if peace is not wholly removed from their hearts, to consider seriously, first, that to criminate and recriminate never yet was the road to reconciliation in any difference amongst men. In the next place, it would be right to reflect that the American-English (whom they may abuse if they think it honorable to revile the absent) can, as things now stand, neither be provoked at our railing, nor bettered by our instruction.

"Contending for an imaginary power, we begin to acquire the spirit of domination, and to lose the relish of honest equality. The principles of our forefathers become suspected to us, because we see them animating the present opposition of our children. The faults which grow out of the luxuriance of freedom appear much more shocking to us than the base vices which are generated from the rankness of servitude. Accordingly the least resistance to power appears more inexcusable in our eyes than the greatest abuses of authority. All dread of a standing military force is looked upon as a superstitious panic.

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"We grow indifferent to the consequences inevitable to ourselves from the plan of ruling half the empire by a mercenary sword.

"We are taught to believe that a desire of domineering over our countrymen is love to our country."

(Edmund Burke's Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America.)

"B'leeve me, my young fren', I kin place my old hands tenderly on the fair young hed of the Virginny maid, whose lover was laid low in the battle dust by a fed'ral bullet, and say, as fervently and piously as a vener'ble sinner like me kin say anything,' God be good to you, my poor dear, my poor dear.' I riz up to go, and takin' my young Southern fren' kindly by the hand, I sed, 'You Southern fellers is probly my brothers, tho' you've occasionally had a cussed queer way of showin' it! It's over now. Let us all give in and make a country on this continent.'"'

(Artemus Ward's Letter from Richmond in 1865.)

WELL-NIGH RECONSTRUCTED.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCED TO YOU.

THERE is of course a woman in this story. In fact, no story worth the telling since Milton and Moses gave us the rupture in Eden has been without its heroine. Often not appearing in the climax, when the lights burn brightest and the orchestra wand moves most rapidly, still the ever-present She has a place in the watchful mind that has annotated the successive steps in the play.

The South has been made solid mainly by her women.

The preachers have helped, it is true; but they were in the main reflectors of the female determination. Mr. Jefferson Davis, but slightly bent, and in no wise broken, (what a magnificent virility his!) looks out from his Gulf home on the fretful waters, which he once dreamed would be encircled by a great Slave Empire, and draws a consolation from the daily evidences given him that the men of the South are more occupied with the price of cotton than with the question of States' rights, in the fact that the great mass of their helpmeets still speak of him as President Davis, and would as soon entertain a Mormon preacher as a native Radical at table or at ball.

If Longstreet has gone to Turkey, Margaret Preston has written a new poem, and he knows that while the minister is despised as playing a weak second to Grant, the poet is loved, and her name is a household word.

Not that her verse is ranked higher than it should be, for the Southern reading woman brings a nicely adjusted taste to bear

over

in the discussion critical; but that the singer gives vent to many thoughts which occupy in part the daily lives of her sex in the South. The minister to the Sultan, on the other hand, is the highest in rank of the Southern men who have "gone to the Northern side since the war, and in consequence has lost caste. The author feels sure, right here, that the dominating feeling of the South on the great subject of its relation to the North, is best found in the frequent use of those homely words applied to every Southern man who votes the Republican ticket.

It is said of such a one, that "he has gone over." Now the evident underlying meaning in this, if anything can be gathered from the tone, look, and bearing of those saying it, is that the man spoken of has committed a grave offence against good morals and the well-being of society. Whether this be true, let this story say further on.

If the gravamen of the offence was that the turn-coat had professed a love for the Union, and was glad that the slaves were free, and had learned to respect the memory of Mr. Lincoln, then surely the Southern people are a greater race of liars than the Euxine Greeks, for on all these and kindred subjects, De Tocqueville, travelling from Richmond to Matamoras, would hear but one expression of opinion. That opinion would be identical with the opinion of the North, with a slight difference in the manner of communicating it.

Above the Potomac, a certain joy in the utterance that all the goody goodies which Mr. Seward had promised, as the result of the war on the South, had come to hand. South of it, that there had been a rash sowing in bitterness and folly, and a harvest in mortification, regret and tears.

However, I am not to philosophize too much in a novel, if George Eliot has set the example. That is the province of history, where woman, the subject with which I set out, seldom

appears.

The ponderous tomes of the past are occupied almost exclusively with what the male half of creation have done; while it is in the novel alone that woman lives to conquer the heroes of