We learn of no distinctions then existing between the different sections of our country, but on the contrary, as the information reaches us, there is room for no other conclusion than that every where alike, our American men were “larger and stronger than the British troops.” Such is the information given us, but such are not the conditions now, for, while the Northern man is reported to be of less compass of body than the European, the men of most, if not all, of that country lying south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and above the feverish swamps of the gulf and the Mississippi River, have kept up to their Revolutionary standard. No one fact, concerning our Western people, is more patent to the observer on the banks of the Ohio River than the fact, that the Kentuckians are larger, taller, and heavier than the people of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois who for eight hundred miles skirt their northern border. The same is true of the Virginians. They are larger, both in height and circumference than their northern neighbors; and in every other Southern State, with the exceptions above noticed, we understand, that a similar development among the higher orders of society exists. An English tourist, who visited both the Northern and Southern armies during the late war, observed this greater development of the Southern men, and so reported it for Blackwood’s Magazine. But the fact is presented with probably more precision by the records of the Smithsonian Institute, whose visitors, for more than twenty years, have been weighed, measured, and their nativities noted. These records, say our informers, showed a difference, before the war, of three inches in height and twenty pounds in weight in favor of the Southern over the Northern man. Such facts can not too forcibly command the attention of every man who aspires to the distinction of making public laws. They show the men of the South, at the beginning of the late war, in the same proportions that they show the men of the whole republic in the days of our revolution, when all the States or colonies, North as well as South, held negro slaves. To what cause, then, are we to impute the greater development of the Anglo-American at those particular times, and in those particular localities, than to the institution of negro slavery?