s easy by cheap rhetoric to open wounds afresh and
inflame hostility; but every true son and daughter of the South should
strive not to transmit a legacy of hate, nor make our land a Poland or
an Ireland. The noble ambition ought rather to be to lift up the South
and the United States to the level of its privileges, and in the future
to harmonize the ideal and the actual. The South needs the development
of her material resources, the diversification of industry, the
construction of permanent highways, the power of machinery in its
manifold applications, sounder notions of labor, rigid economy and
responsibility in all offices. The whole country should encourage
universal education in universities, colleges, academies, and public
schools; elevate the tone of a free press; preserve an able and
independent judiciary; insist upon juster and more enlarged ideas of
official duty; maintain the principles of constitutional liberty and
absolute freedom of religion, and above all, a spirit of subordination
to the divine law, and a reverent acknowledgment of Him in whose hands
are the destinies of nations.

J. L. M. CURRY.

DRIFT-WOOD.

TALK ABOUT NOVELS.

IF the St. Louis preacher who lately tilted against novels chose
judiciously his points of attack, he presumably won a victory. His own
Sunday-school library is very likely filled with wishy-washy fiction
for bright young minds that might be harvesting works worth
remembering, whether of romance or history. The prudent Quakers of
Germantown rejoice in a free library without a novel, and a librarian
who never read one. Indiscriminate novel reading is as sorry a tipple
as addiction to newspapers, which also, in fact, are largely works of
the imagination. Besides, the moral of even a goody-good story may be
ingeniously twisted by perverse readers. The other day a lad was
indicted in England for breaking into the Rev. Mr. Sherratt's
schoolroom, where he stole some books and cake, trudging off with them
in a wheelbarrow at midnight. He was an old pupil, the son of
respectable parents; in his pocket was a book entitled "Industry
Without Honesty," and his ambition was to become a _Chevalier
d'Industrie_ of the sort he had been reading about. It is said that
Dumas's story, "Monsieur Fromentin," so spread the rage for lottery
gambling that the author in great grief bought up and burned every copy
he could lay hands on. For generations English youth have turned
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