warfare--shall not the Church of Christ register them, each one, in the roll of heroes and of martyrs, by whose immortal example she will seek to stimulate the generations to come?” * * * * * THE EDUCATION OF FREEDMEN. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe has contributed two articles with the above title to the June and July numbers of the _North American Review_, tracing the history of this work, and giving a valuable summary of its present status. We reprint a brief paragraph and the six general propositions, of which the facts given are offered as the proof: “For years patriots, statesmen, conscientious and Christian men, had toiled and agonized over the inscrutable problem, _How_ could slavery be abolished without ruin to the country? Madison, Jefferson, Washington, all had their schemes--all based on the idea that after emancipation it would be impossible for the whites and the blacks to live harmoniously together. Sudden emancipation was spoken of as something involving danger, bloodshed and violence; and yet, as no one could propose a feasible system of preparation, the drift of the Southern mind had come to be toward indefinite perpetuation and extension. “Our emancipation was forced upon us--it was sudden; it gave no time for preparation; and our national honor forced us to give not only emancipation, but the rights and defenses of citizenship. This was the position in which the war left us. We had four million new United States citizens in our Union, without property, without education, with such morals as may be inferred from the legal status in which they had been kept; they were surrounded by their former white owners, every way embittered toward them, and in no wise disposed to smooth their path to liberty and competence. “That in such a sudden and astounding change there should have been struggle and conflict; that the reconstruction of former slave States, in such astonishingly new conditions of society, should have been with some difficulty, wrath and opposition; that there should have been contentions, mistakes, mismanagements, and plenty of undesirable events to make sensation articles for the daily press, was to be expected. “But wherever upon God’s earth was such an unheard-of revolution in the state of human society accomplished with so little that was to be deprecated? “For in this year, 1878, certain propositions of very great significance bear assertion, and can be maintained by ample proof: “1. The cotton crop raised by free labor is the largest by some millions that ever has been raised in the United States. That settles the question as to the free-labor system. “2. The legal status of the negro is universally conceded as a _finality_ by the leading minds of the South. “3. The common-school system has been established throughout the Southern States, and recognized in theory by the wisest Southern men as to be applied impartially to whites and blacks.