especially of "fine-looking wenches," the beauties of lynch-law, the delights of horse-racing, the excitement of street fights with bowie-knives and revolvers, the "manifest destiny" theory that justifies the stealing of all territory contiguous to our own, and kindred topics, constitute the warp and woof of conversation. All this is on a level with the general intelligence of the Slave States. It is true, these States have their educated men,--the majority of whom owe their literary culture to the colleges of the North. Not that there are no Southern colleges--for there are institutions, so called, in a majority of the Slave States.--Some of them, too, are not deficient in the appointments requisite to our higher educational institutions; but as a general thing, Southern colleges are colleges only in _name_, and will scarcely take rank with a third-rate Northern academy, while our academies, with a few exceptions, are immeasurably inferior to the public schools of New-York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The truth is, there is a vast inert mass of stupidity and ignorance, too dense for individual effort to enlighten or remove, in all communities cursed with the institution of slavery. Disguise the unwelcome truth as we may, slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and of vices, and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture. The masses, if they think of literature at all, think of it only as a costly luxury, to be monopolized by the few. The proportion of white adults over twenty years of age, in each State, who cannot read and write, to the _whole_ white population, is as follows: Connecticut, 1 to every 568 Vermont, 1 " 473 N. Hampshire, 1 " 310 Massachusetts, 1 " 166 Maine, 1 " 108 Michigan, 1 " 97 Rhode Island, 1 " 67 New Jersey, 1 " 58 New York, 1 " 56 Pennsylvania, 1 " 50 Ohio, 1 " 43 Indiana, 1 " 18 Illinois, 1 " 17 Louisiana, 1 to every 38-1/2 Maryland 1 " 27 Mississippi, 1 " 20 Delaware, 1 " 18 South Carolina, 1 " 17 Missouri, 1 " 16 Alabama, 1 " 15 Kentucky, 1 " 13-1/2 Georgia, 1 " 13 Virginia, 1 " 12-1/2 Arkansas, 1 " 11-1/2 Tennessee, 1 " 11 North Carolina, 1 " 7