To-day we are living in and for the present alone. Men's minds are so completely absorbed in the wonderful events that are constantly passing around them, in the startling _denouements_ that each day brings forth, that their attention is entirely distracted from that future to which we are inevitably tending. And this not because that future is of little importance, but because nearer and more vital interests are staring us in the face, in which it is involved, and upon which it depends--a nearer and more portentous future, which we must ourselves control and shape, else the farther state will be utterly beyond our influence, fixed in the channel of a malignant and ever-grovelling fate. The great question now is, how soonest to end the war prosperously to ourselves; and until this problem, involving our very existence, is solved, the future, with all its prospects, good or bad, is left to take care of itself, and rightly, too; for in the event of our present success, our future will be in our own hands, while, if we fail, it will be fixed and irrevocable, without the slightest reference to our interests or our exertions. And yet, natural as this fact may seem, it is a little singular that, while thousands of minds are eagerly searching for light upon the question of the future of the American negro, few are found to inquire what is to be our own. Strange that one exciting topic should so fill men's minds and monopolize their sympathies as to entirely exclude other questions of greater importance, and bearing more directly upon our present and vital interests. Yet so it is, and so it has been in all ages of the world, though, happily, the hallucination does not last for any very extended period; for there is a compensation in human as well as in inanimate nature, which, in its own good time, brings mind to its proper balance by the harsh remedy of severe and present necessity, and so retrieves the errors of a blind past. Yet, absorbed as is the popular mind in the stirring events of the war, and dull as all other themes may seem in comparison, it may not be without interest to examine, in connection with our future, some of those facts which are now floating about at random on the surface of society, waiting for some hand to gather and arrange them in the treasure house of prophecy. And in so doing, let it be premised that we proceed entirely upon the hypothesis--which to every truly loyal mind is already an established truth--of the ultimate success and complete triumph of the North in the present contest. For in any other event all these facts are dumb, and the inferences to be drawn from them vague and unsatisfactory, absolutely no better than mere random conjecture. And as the war has now become the great fact in our history, and its effects must modify our whole social life for many years to come, its results must not be neglected in an investigation of this kind, but, on the contrary, claim our first attention.