Richmond. But this was only for the sake of appearances. Once arm and drill the negroes, and they can never be slaves again. This is admitted on all hands, and accordingly, whatever the words of the act may be, it practically at once promotes the negro to manhood by brevet, as it were, but at any rate to manhood. For the offer of emancipation as a bounty implies reason in him to whom it is offered; nay, more, implies a capacity for progress and a wish, for it, which are in themselves valid titles to freedom. This at a step puts the South back to the position held by her greatest men in regard to slavery. All the Scriptural arguments, all the fitness of things, all the physiological demonstrations, all Mr. Stephens's corner-stones, Ham, Onesimus, heels, hair, and facial angle,--all are swept out, by one flirt of the besom of Fate, into the inexorable limbo of things that were and never should have been. How is Truth wounded to death in the house of her friends! The highest authority of the South has deliberately renounced its vested interest in the curse of Noah, and its right to make beasts of black men because St. Paul sent back a white one to his master. Never was there a more exact verification of the Spanish proverb, that he who went out for wool may come back shorn. Alas for Nott and Gliddon! Thrice alas for Bishop Hopkins! With slavery they lose their hold on the last clue by which human reason could find its way to a direct proof of the benevolence of God and the plenary inspiration of Scripture.