An electrician of rare skill tells me it is a humbug. If we cannot get at the truth about matters near at home, what shall be expected regarding matters in a distant section of the country? The Republican believes what his newspaper tells him about the South, and the Democrat does not believe it. They never unite for investigation. The historian will say hereafter that the real outrage was in our criminal neglect to ascertain the truth. It is easy to see that it is supremely difficult to get at the facts about two races jostling together, like huge vessels thumping and pounding against each other in a rolling sea. Last year the negro paper in Charleston, South Carolina, advocated the election of a Democratic mayor. The Republican papers had no use for that fact. It did not indicate the existence of outrages. It was rather in the line of what Tyndall calls the tragedy of science—a beautiful theory killed by an incontrovertible fact. For two years the Democratic party of Georgia has been so broken up that as many as six or seven independent Democratic tickets in local issues have been in the field in many counties, and the white candidate, who has captured a negro vote, sees to it with rifle and revolver that no other white opponent interferes with that black vote. Facts like these occur by the hundred in Southern politics, but the Republican press ignore them. The Northern men who are educating the negro regard Captain Thompson, superintendent of public schools in South Carolina, as one of the most efficient men of the South in extending negro education; but the _Tribune_ calls him a bloody-shirt orator. The negro teacher is at present his best friend, and his evidence about the whites should be credible if not conclusive. * * * * * AN ILLUSTRATED PRESS. We have received two communications lately in regard to the importance of the Press in the education of the colored people—one from an esteemed friend in the West, urging that other institutions should follow the example of Hampton and Talladega in publishing papers. We are not sure that this is altogether desirable. There must be many favoring conditions to make it a success; otherwise there is a certainty of pecuniary loss and wasted effort. The other letter is from an English missionary in the West Indies, who thus states the case as to the value of periodical literature to supplement the influences of the church and the school: