Why should the South fight against the inevitable? In a recent number of the _Century_, a Confederate officer, Col. Alexander, in giving a racy sketch of Pickett’s famous charge at Gettysburg, incidentally refers, in a humorous way, to one of their chaplains who was accustomed to pray that “Providence would consent at last to come down and take a _proper_ view of the situation.” The Colonel, at one auspicious juncture in the preliminary fight, was inclined to believe that the prayer of the good chaplain was about to be answered. But when all was over and the battle was lost, he dryly admits that “Providence had evidently not yet taken a proper view of the situation.” The same admission was equally pertinent at Appomattox—and has been ever since—indeed, is it not time for the South to see that the trouble is not with Providence but with itself—that _it_ should “consent at last to take a proper view of the situation”? Providence did not take its view during the war to sustain slavery, and will not in the struggle to maintain caste, which is now the great issue, as slavery then was. That issue the South is pushing to the front with new energy. For example, the great churches, Methodist and Presbyterian, that had been rent asunder by the anti-slavery agitation before the war, had seemed for a time since to be happily coming together once more, but recently that fair prospect has become darkened, and mainly by the strong exactions in regard to caste-separation demanded by the South. Then as to schools, the South has always been understood to be opposed to the co-education of the races, but the recent demonstrations in one of the States are almost amusingly violent. We stolid Northern people are tempted to smile at the fear that the white young gentlemen and ladies of the South are so eager to marry negroes that they dare not be trusted in the same school together, and that such stringent measures as fines, imprisonment and the chain-gang are deemed necessary to prevent it! But we are glad to find that these severe measures were planned by over-zealous young politicians, and that “the sober second thought of the people” has substituted less barbarous methods, and that other Southern States do not follow the bad example. But more seriously, the South has never enforced laws against the criminal mingling of the races that has almost bleached the negroes white. Is lawful marriage more criminal than concubinage? But who wants the intermarriage of the races to take place? Not the North, certainly. The Southern whites ought to be able to resist the temptation. Every step in the advancement of the blacks contradicts the charge that they desire it. No! the charge is fictitious, and is only paraded to give force to the plea for caste-distinction and exclusion, which is now the main hindrance to the incoming of the Brotherhood of Man.