I

F IT appears on the face of it that undue prominence is given to Col. Henry Watterson in the succeeding pages, the writer must disclaim any such intention. And if it is with no purpose of providing him with any momentary exaltation in the public eye in republishing the reply to his strictures on the civilization of the antebellum South, neither is it with any desire to lower him in the estimation of his worshipers. His spontaneous and useless offense to his native land and people has itself rendered him sufficiently conspicuous. He doubtless thinks

"To heal the inveterate canker of one wound

By making many."

His brief and profitless excursion into the sterile field of slander might have had its fruitlessness accentuated better, perhaps, by silence on our part. For silence is generally accepted as the fittest expression of the attitude of the public towards the unfortunate a silence which so frequently, instead of contempt bears sympathy or compassion in its bosom. And if the stale, mechanical applause of the claqueurs of the Northern press and people is what his morbid appetite craves, then is he thrice welcome to the banquet table. We can only regret that he has become cloyed with the rich and generous viands his own home and people have so long spread out before him in such bounty and profusion.

Conspicuous as the editor of one of the oldest and ablest journals in the country, Col. Watterson in proclaiming his latest confession of faith simply afforded himself the opportunity of being selected as the representative of a species, which, from its original habitat in the North, has unfortunately overrun its natural boundaries and become largely prevalent in the South. While not identical, the limitations of both him and his congeners are of the same general description, the Southern variety being merely a graft on the parent stock of the immense propaganda of the Northern Holy See. Their minds padlocked, they never advance in their knowledge of and consequently in their opinions on the South. And if they do not advance, neither can they retreat. They seem doomed to tramp on forever in the mental treadmill to which their mental limitations and their narrow prejudices have forever harnessed them, while the black blinders over their eyes of the negro and nothing but the negro shut out every beauty of the surrounding landscape and condemn them to the ceaseless

and perpetual monotony of gazing at the wooden barrier immediately before their faces. They are the Latter Day Saints of that departed angelic host, the Abolitionists, of whom Hawthorne said, "There was the Abolitionist, brandishing his one idea like an iron flail." They conceive that on them has fallen the mantle of their Elijah, translated to their heaven in war's chariot of fire-the heaven-swept last remnants of the merciless tornado of flame that devoured our towns and cities, our homes and homesteads, in which our manor-houses and our country villages perished, whose fiery arms reached up even for the steeples of the sanctuaries where we worshiped God, and whose hot breath consumed to ashes the very cradles of the mind where we nurtured and cherished the unfolding intellects of our sons and daughers in the admonitions of learning and its mighty precepts. Evidently for us at least there was no purification but by fire, no regeneration but by devastation. And if we were to be led out of the wilderness of our transgressions, what more faithful guide, what more fitting symbol to forever fasten our guilty eyes and fix our depraved minds on the salvation that was decreed us, than the notorious "pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night" of Mr. Lincoln's faithful and trusty lieutenant in his march to the shores of the sounding sea, whose mighty waves even were powerless to confine his monstrous crime and only glutted it with fresh appetite and new direction?

It is fallacious to assert that these are events pertaining to "ancient history," as the Northern people so nonchalantly dismiss the dreary subject with a curl of the lip and a wave of the hand, when they are confronted with the unpleasant fact that they are a people with a past. They are events that do not even belong to the realm of mediaeval chronicles. They are among the latest productions of modern history, quite modern-so modern that they themselves frequently in their idle and unsuspecting moments clothe themselves in the garment and consider that they are "the glass of fashion and the mold of form," costumed quite à la mode, in the height of style, until their eye rests "by chance or watchful Providence" on some unsightly ruffle that had escaped the notice of the swarms of maids that preside over the wardrobes of their history and which they thought had been relegated to the rag bag, locked up in the attic to commune forever in silence and seclusion with the skeletons of their past