At New Orleans, fifteen hundred miles from New York, you get, in your morning paper, whatever was known in London yesterday of English and European news. And this department of an American journal contains a great deal more than we, in this country, are in the habit of seeing in the _Times_ and other English papers, as the messages brought to us by the Atlantic cable; because we want intelligence only from the United States, whereas they wish to get from us not only what is going on in England, but in every part of Europe, and in fact in every part of the Old World. As one is thus day after day, whether you be in the centre, or thousands of miles away, at some almost unknown extremity, of this vast transatlantic region, kept well informed as to what is passing over almost all the earth, one feels that there are agencies at work amongst us which in some respects render ‘the wisdom of the ancients’ a little obsolete. Formerly it would have been thought impossible to harmonise such discordant elements as the North and the South. How could they ever dwell together as brethren, who were locally so remote from each other, that while one was basking in a sub-tropical sun, the other was shrinking from the nipping frosts of the severest winter; whose institutions, too, and interests, and antecedents had in many essential points been very dissimilar; and whose differences at last had broken out into a fierce and sanguinary war? Could they ever be fused into a single homogeneous people? Down to the times of our fathers, it would have been quite impossible. Each would then have kept only to his own region, and known no influences but those which were native to it. But now we have changed all that. A few threads of wire overhead, and a few bars of iron on the levelled ground, will do all that is wanted. For extreme remoteness they have substituted so close a contiguity that the North and South can now talk together. The dissimilar institutions, interests, and antecedents of the past, however strong they may be in themselves, become powerless when something stronger has arisen; and this new power is now vigorously at work undermining and counteracting their effects. And it is a power that will also exorcise envy, hatred, and malice. Men are what their ideas are, for it is ideas that make the man. And every morning these two people have the same ideas, and the same facts out of which ideas are made, put in the same words before them. The wire threads overhead do this. And if a Southern man, from what he reads this morning, thinks that his interests call him to the North, or a Northern man that his call him to the South, the railway, like the piece of carpet in the Eastern story, will transport them hither and thither in a moment. It ensures that there shall be a constant stream of human beings flowing in each direction. Everyone can foresee the result—that there must, sooner or later, be one homogeneous people. Formerly the difference of their occupations