t the native planter, is made to bear the heaviest blow.
The principal character, Colonel J----, is one of nature's noblemen,
struggling through aristocratic education and circumstance with an evil
whose evil he cannot comprehend. Very valuable indeed are the sketches
of life among the 'mean whites.' No descriptions of them to be compared
with these in _The Pines_ have ever yet appeared. They rise clear as
cameo-reliefs on a dark ground, and we feel that they too are like the
slave-holder, victims like the slave, of a system, and not with him,
deliberate wretches. Their squalor, ignorance, pride, and
dependence--their whole social _status_, inferior to that of the blacks
whom they despise, appear as set forth, we do not say by a master-hand,
but _by themselves_.

This work, tolerant and just, yet striking, has appeared at the right
time. While interesting as a novel, it is full of solid, simple
facts--it is based on them and built up with them. Without attempting to
set forth a principle, it shows beyond dispute that slavery does not pay
in the South as well as free labor would, and that the blacks would
produce more as free laborers than as slaves. It shows that Emancipation
for the sake of the White Man is a great truth, and that the white man
would be benefited by raising the sense of independence in the black,
and by elevating him in every way in which he is capable of improvement.

It may be said with great truth of _The Pines_, that it would be
difficult to find a book in which such striking facts and vivid pictures
are set forth with such perfect simplicity of language. There is no
effort at fine writing in it, and no consciousness of its absence. The
author never seems to have realized that a story could be told for
effect, and the natural result has been the most unintentional yet the
strongest effect. The practical eye of one familiar with planks and
turpentine, building and farming, business and furniture, economy and
comfort, betrays itself continually. He sees how things could be
bettered not as a mere philanthropist would try to see them, but as one
who knows how capital ought to be employed, and he appreciates the fact
that the sufferings of the people of every class in the South are really
based on the _wastefulness_ of the present system. That this spirit
should be combined with a keen observation of local humor, and in
several instances with narratives imbued with deep pathos, is not,
however, remarka