Despite all its external show of elan, courtesy, and chivalry, 'the South,' as it exists, is and ever must be, in the very great aggregate, inferior to the North in the elements of progress, and in nearly all that constitutes true superiority. They boast incessantly of their superior education and culture; but what literature or art has this education produced amid their thousands of ladies and gentlemen of taste and of leisure? The Northern editor of any literary magazine who has had any experience in by-gone days with the manuscripts of the chivalry, will shrug his shoulders with a smile as he recalls the reams of reechoes of Northern writers, and not unfrequently of mere 'sensation' third-rate writers at that, which he was wont to receive from Dixie. And amid all his vaunts and taunts, the consciousness of this intellectual inferiority never left the Southerner. It stimulated his hatred--it rankled in his heart. He might boast or lie--and his chief statistician, De Bow, was so notoriously convicted of falsifying facts and figures that the assertion, as applied to him, is merely historical--but it was of no avail. The Northern school and the Northern college continued to be the great fountain of North-American intellect, and the Southerner found himself year by year falling behind-hand intellectually and socially as well as numerically. As a last resort, despairing of victory in the _real_, he plunged after the wild chivalric dream of independence; of Mexican and Cuban conquest; of an endless realm and a reopened slave-trade--or at least of holding the cotton mart of the world. It is all in vain. We of the same continent recognize no right in a very few millions to seize on the land which belongs as much to our descendants and to the labor of all Europe and of the world as it does to them. They have _no right_ to exclude white labor by slaves. A Doughface press may cry, Compromise; and try to restore the _status quo ante bellum_, but all in vain. The best that can be hoped for, is some ingenious temporary arrangement to break the fall of their old slaveholding friends. It is not as _we_ will, or as _we_ or _you_ would _like_, that what the Southerners themselves term a conflict of races, can be settled. People who burn their own cities and fire their own crops are going to the dire and bitter end; and the Might which under God's providence is generally found in the long run of history to be the Right--will triumph at last.