As far as I could see and hear, the State of Mississippi also was in a very bad way. This seemed to arise from two causes. A larger proportion of the white inhabitants than is the case elsewhere belong to the class called in the South ‘mean whites,’—that is, persons without property, education, or enterprise. And then the planters are unable to borrow what is requisite for enabling them to work their plantations. No one will lend them a cent. This is but a natural consequence of the act of repudiation they adopted at the instigation of Mr. J. Davis, late President of the Southern Confederacy, and whom this State has either the honour or the dishonour of reckoning among her best known men. This, however, is not the only light in which the South has to be regarded. There is the question of political as well as of industrial reconstruction, and the former is now throughout all the North shaking the very foundations of the Union, and setting the son against the father, and the brother against the brother. The question is being dealt with entirely and exclusively on party considerations, and this Mr. Thaddeus Stevens and other leaders of the Republican party have acknowledged in speech and print. They say universal suffrage, whatever the consequences to the Southern planter, must be conceded to the blacks, in order that the South may return to the Union, not as of old, on the Democratic side, but on the Republican, as the present exigencies of that party and of the Union require. Nothing can secure this except the black vote. All considerations of the fitness of the late slave for the exercise of the franchise is thus dismissed, and nothing insisted on but what is needed by the necessities of the dominant party. [Sidenote: _The Negro Franchise._] Of course no man who knows anything of the capacity and of the history of the black race, even if he be of the Republican party, abstractedly thinks that they are qualified for taking part in the government of the country, and of legislating for and governing many of the Southern States.