fire of manhood from reaching that gunpowder of the dangerous classes which underlies all institutions based only on the wisdom of our ancestors. As we look back to the beginnings of the Rebellion, we are struck with the thoughtlessness with which both parties entered upon a war of whose vast proportions and results neither was even dimly conscious. But a manifest difference is to be remarked. In the South this thoughtlessness was the result of an ignorant self-confidence, in the North of inexperience and good humor. It was long before either side could believe that the other was in earnest: the one in attacking a government which they knew only by their lion's share in its offices and influence, the other in resisting the unprovoked assault of a race born in the saddle, incapable of subjugation, and unable to die comfortably except in the last ditch of jubilant oratory. When at last each was convinced of the other's sincerity, the moods of both might have been predicted by any observer of human nature. The side which felt that it was not only in the wrong, but that it had made a blunder, lost all control of its temper, all regard for truth and honor. It betook itself forthwith to lies, bluster, and cowardly abuse of its antagonist. But beneath every other expression of Southern sentiment, and seeming to be the base of it, was a ferocity not to be accounted for by thwarted calculations or by any resentment at injuries received, but only by the influence of slavery on the character and manners. "Scratch a Russian," said Napoleon, "and you come to the Tartar beneath." Scratch a slaveholder, and beneath the varnish of conventionalism you come upon something akin to the man-hunter of Dahomey. Nay, the selfishness engendered by any system which rests on the right of the strongest is more irritable and resentful in the civilized than the savage man, as it is enhanced by a consciousness of guilt. In the first flush of over-confidence, when the Rebels reckoned on taking Washington, the air was to be darkened with the gibbeted carcasses of dogs and caitiffs. Pollard, in the first volume of his _Southern History of the War_, prints without comment the letter of a ruffian who helped butcher our wounded in Sudley Church after the first battle of Manassas, in which he says that he had resolved to give no quarter. In Missouri the Rebels took scalps as trophies, and that they made personal ornaments of the bones of our unburied dead, and that women wore them, though seeming incredible, has been proved beyond question. Later in the war, they literally starved our prisoners in a country where Sherman's army of a hundred thousand men found supplies so abundant that they could dispense with their provision train. Yet these were the "gentry" of the country, in whose struggle to escape from the contamination of mob-government the better classes of England so keenly sympathized. Our experience is thrown away unless it teach us