It is to be said in reference to one part of Gerrit Smith's advice, that Southerners were only too ready to sell their lands at any price or on any terms to whoever would buy. Had the negroes applied the industrial education which they then possessed they might have become owners of half the territory of the South. Politicians and theorists who diverted negroid energies into other channels were unconsciously serving Nature's purpose, the preservation of the Anglo-Saxon race. Upon every measure that might thwart that purpose, Nature seems to smile serenely, turning it to reverse account. * * * * * A lively account of the seating of the first negro in the Congress of the United States was contained in a letter of February, 1870, from my friend, Miss Winfield, stopping in Washington. "Revels," she wrote, "occupies the seat of Jefferson Davis. The Republicans made as much of the ceremony as possible. To me it was infinitely sad, and infinitely absurd. We run everything in the ground in America. Here, away from the South, where the tragedy of it all is not so oppressively before me and where I see only the political clap-trap of the whole African business, I am prone to lose sight of the graver side and find things simply funny." A lively discussion preceded the seating. Senator Wilson said something very handsome about the "Swan Song of Slavery" and God's hand in the present state of affairs; as he was soaring above the impious Democrats, Mr. Casserly, one of the last-named sinners, bounced up and asked: "I would like to know when and where the Senator from Massachusetts obtained a commission to represent the Almighty in the Senate? I have not heard of such authorisation, and if such person has been selected for that office, it is only another illustration of the truism that the ways of Providence are mysterious and past finding out." Laughter put the "Swan Song" off key; Casserly said something about senators being made now, not by the voice of God and the people, but by the power of the bayonet, when somebody flung back at him, "You use the shelalah in New York!"