"Weep o'er their wounds, o'er tales of sorrow done. Shoulder their crutch and show how fields are won." shall have "passed over the river;" when the threnody of the "olden days" which to us is like the music of Carrol along the hills of Slimora, "pleasant, but mournful to the soul," shall be forgotten, some ambitious youth will uplift the veil; will take a glance of the whole horizon, and the south will unbosom her griefs that have been so long concealed. It will not do for a hand that drew the sword to guide the pen. By a law of our nature all passive impressions impair our moral sensibilities. Contact with misery renders us callous to those experiences; a constant view of vice lessens its deformity. If any expression in this humble narrative shall appear ill-tempered, let me say in the language of Themistocles at the battle of Salamis, "Strike, but hear me." The whole country has long since repudiated the dogma that "all men are born free and equal" and endowed with certain imprescriptible and inalienable rights. This heresy of course found its highest expression in the post-bellum amendments to the constitution, and the remedial statutes which made their efficiency complete. The war was the logical fulfillment of prophecies that had their forecast in the public councils before the nullification doctrine was forced upon the Senate by Mr. Calhoun. It sprang without extraneous aid from uninterpretable expressions in the organic law, which were finally explained away in the effusion of blood. Reconstruction, in the conception of men who provided the sinews of war, was the prolific aftermath; and in this harvest field, the gleaners plied their vocation with merciless activity, reinforced in their villainies by the freedmen, who, in an experimental way, were publicly evincing their unfitness for citizenship. The Civil war gendered this brood that filled the South with horror, and their disorders and tumults precipitated a crisis that plunged the Southland into a paroxysm from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. There was no refuge from an evil that was all-pervasive. The great war with its pageants and sacrifices, its banners and generals, its storming soldiery and reservoirs of human blood was almost thrust out of the memory as the patriots of the sixties stood face to face to the all-encompassing perils of reconstruction. They saw the flag of the Union--the almost lifeless emblem of the genius of their liberties--frown feebly at the promulgation of a law that disfranchised 300,000 American citizens. The old banner seemed to turn her eye to the eagle at her staff-head and ask him to lend her his wide-spreading pinions, that she might bend the wing and fly away from the polluted spot--from the embodied forms of evil and ruin. Almost every utterance of the complaining tongue that was syllabled into speech, was to this effect: "Will our country--our civilization--withstand the shock?" Our