ildren than the clumsy old
system of pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings. It is a system
which would no doubt have been long ago adopted by England, if it had
not been humiliating to our national pride to take even a good thing
from rebellious Yankees, and inferior Latin races. We cling fondly
to absurdities because they are our own. In Australia wild rabbits
are vermin, in England they are private property; and if one of the
three millions of her miserable paupers is found with a rabbit in
each of his coat pockets, he is fined 10s. or sent to gaol. Pope
Gregory XIII. demonstrated the error of the calendar then in use, and
all Catholic nations adopted his correction. But when the adoption
of the calendar was proposed in Parliament, John Bull put his big
foot down at once; he would receive no truth, not even a mathematical
one, from the Pope of Rome, and it was only after the lapse of nearly
200 years, when the memory of Gregory and his calendar had almost
faded away from the sensitive mind of Protestantism, that an Act was
passed, "equalising the style in Great Britain and Ireland with that
used in other countries of Europe."

A fugitive slave with his wife and daughter came to Joliet. One day
he was seized by three slave-hunters, who took him towards the canal.
A number of abolitionists assembled to rescue the slave, but the
three men drew their revolvers, and no abolitionist had the courage
to fire the first shot. The slave was put in a canal boat and went
south; his wife remained in Joliet and earned her bread by weaving
drugget; the daughter came to my school; she was of pure negro blood,
but was taught with the white girls.

The abolitionists were increasing in number, and during the war with
the South the slaves were freed. They are now like Israel in Egypt,
they increase too rapidly. If father Abraham had sent them back to
Africa when they were only four millions, he would have earned the
gratitude of his country. Now they number more than eight millions;
the Sunny South agrees with their constitution; they work as little
and steal as much as possible. In the days of their bondage they
were addicted to petty larceny; now they have votes, and when they
achieve place and power they are addicted to grand larceny, and they
loot the public treasury as unblushingly as the white politicians.

The nigger question has doubled in magnitude during the last thirty
years, and there will have to be another ab