something new in our university life; and in Oberlin, Antioch, Galesburg, and other rising colleges, it is solving the problem of the united university education of the sexes. From this region went forth the early movement against slavery, and its vote was united for Fremont in 1856. In religion it occupies the liberal wing of every American Church. Out of it came the theological and philanthropic agitation which divided every great American Protestant Church, save the Episcopal, before 1860.

Every good idea moves through our human life dogged by a black shadow; and it is not strange that this most progressive, intellectual, and energetic order of Northern society should be exposed to all the dangers of radicalism in its most extreme and varied forms. This region of our country has given birth to a multitude of excitable and unbalanced spirits, who have published their opinions in perfect freedom during the last twenty-five years. The system of popular lectures, the press, the convention, have given every facility to this class of agitators; and the lively interest of the masses of the people has always secured a large hearing to every public teacher who did not add to his radical extravagance the conservative grace of stupidity. The prolonged agitations in the churches have also bred destructive fanaticisms and desolating scepticisms, which have alarmed many good men for the existence of the Church itself. The political life of this district is never stagnant; for every month some new monster makes the sea of popular opinion "boil like a pot of ointment." Business is perpetually sounding the deeps and scaling the heights of speculation. And even the family is assailed by strange theories of marriage, which threaten to dissolve society itself. There is no doubt that the charge of the whole world is true, that this portion of America is the battle-ground of all possible and impossible theories of human affairs.

But the enemies of the radical North, in their estimate of its tendencies, fail to discover the grand, distinctive characteristic of this remarkable people, its deep faith in the spiritual and moral side of human life. There never was a

people on this earth who believed so firmly in the spirituality and immortality of man, the justice and perpetual providence of God, and the eternal distinction between right and wrong, as this. They inherit this faith from their ancestors, the noble middle-class of Great Britain, who represent the most profound religious faith of the northern European races. This faith is a part of the spiritual furniture of every nativeborn Northern boy or girl. It may be dormant for long periods in whole classes or communities: indeed, the intense activity of the mental and executive faculty often gives it no opportunity to awake. Our people love to think, discuss, and work, for the pure enjoyment of the thing. Hence people whose volume of life is smaller, and whose religious sentiments lie nearer the surface and are more easily excited, declaim against us as a prosaic, materialistic, and irreligious race. But let some deep and searching experience penetrate below the region of thought and work, and unseal the deep fountains of his native faith, and this Northern man starts up, a hero, a reformer, a martyr, or a saint. The gorgeous ritualism of the old European churches is now but a thicket of thorns which he overleaps, or tears through on his swift flight to his God. His intellect is kindled by the great fire below it, and flashes a startling light into the face of every accepted theory of life, in complete faith that all truth can bear the strongest illumination. He knows himself too well to fear the full indulgence of his head and hands, while his soul takes hold on the everlasting realities.

This faith in spiritual things is at once the fountain of perpetual life, and the protecting providence of the Northern people. For want of it, the South, and all southern nations, are vibrating continually between the wildest fanaticisms, and utter despotism. A South-Carolina secessionist, an Italian priest, an Austrian nobleman, knows by experience the danger of free thought among his own people. They see how a new idea maddens the popular mind, and speedily ultimates itself in a social anarchy, the very image of the infernal world. They suppose a people which thinks so intensely and freely as the radical North must be in a state

of spiritual, social, and civil delirium. But they do not know this great Northern soul, that, amidst its fiercest flames, is cooled by breezes from that high zone of life where God and man abide together. This portion of the United States is not only the home of radicalism in theory, but of the finest order in actual affairs. When its people have come to the end of their speculations, and begin the real work of life, they throw away nothing essential that has been gained by the toils of the past. They are deliberate in legislation, firm in administering justice, and practical in all their ideas. Mr. Phillips argued twenty years to persuade this people that it was a sin to vote and hold office under the government of the United States. He was the most popular orator of the North; but we never heard of an Abolitionist who was not glad to hold any office that Father Abraham could be induced to give him. Jackson Davis, the trance "media," and the advocates of every form of no-religion, have had the field clear to do their best; but there is no community that can be kept out of the churches when a saintly and eloquent man stands in the pulpit: and the Northern Church was never so active and really influential as now. Business, education, amusement, domestic and social life, are all moving towards a firmer basis. The pecuniary honesty, the solid learning, the domestic purity, the abiding cheerfulness of this republic, are emphatically to be found north of this line of demarcation. There is more gross sensuality in the homes of the poor Southern emigrants in Southern Indiana and Illinois, than in all the country above the fortieth parallel of latitude: indeed, most of the disorders, spiritual and social, in this region, can be traced either to Southern or European emigrants from lands of civil and religious despotism.

It is true that, socially, this region of the West is still somewhat crude, unformed, and stern. The aristocratic society of the South-west, including as it did but few elements of social refinement, ripened far more quickly; and, ten years ago, was the most attractive west of the Alleghanies. But it built on a class and not on man, and went down into the awful gulf of rebellion, from whose smoking deeps now

emerge the ghastly spectres of defunct gentility which yet gibber and squeak in faded drawing-rooms, and turn the heads of soft young people of ample means in the cities of the West. Meanwhile our Western social life moves slowly, because it is building the new temple of republican society; more anxious now to lay its foundations deeply, than to overload a thin wall with ornaments that will bring it to the dust. Every observing man, who travels from Maine to Minnesota, must admire the gradual but constant growth of a beautiful social refinement in city and country. There are villages in New York, Michigan, Northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, from which the visitor goes away with a new comprehension of human kindliness, and a refinement born of the heart. This inevitable movement is slowly shaping our American society; and neither the fashionable insanity nor the mimicry of foreign follies among the wealthy snobs of our cities will materially arrest its progress.

This Northern radical people will become the ruling power in American affairs. It has already captured the great line of central cities from Philadelphia to Leavenworth. It is moulding the entire population between the thirty-eighth and fortieth parallels of latitude to its own ideas. It is now the only concentrated power in the Union. While Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis wrangle and hesitate, and never gather themselves up for one grand effort, the whole array of Northern towns, from Albany to St. Paul, are the well-organized division of a host that goes on conquering and to conquer. It already holds the republic beyond the Mississippi, save Texas, in the grasp of its ideas. It rules, as permanent ruling has always been done, not through numbers, but through breadth and force of character. It is not afraid even to offer universal amnesty and universal suffrage through Mr. Chase, or forgiveness and forgetfulness of the whole past through Mr. Seward, as its final programme of policy. It will at last repudiate the weak devices of those who recommend a re-organization of the South through a centralized military power. The Secretary of State, the Chief Justice, General Grant, and Abraham Lincoln, know

most of the radical North. It only asks an opportunity to get at the rest of the country with its ideas; and, once marshalled on the decisive field, it has no fear of the result.

Even were there any danger to American institutions from the radical North, it would be averted by the peculiar order of society that prevails between the thirty-eighth and fortieth parallels of north latitude. This region includes New Jersey, Southern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Northern Maryland, and Northern Virginia of the old States. Even before the emigration to the North-west, it struck the valley of the Ohio at Marietta and Cincinnati, and has poured a tide of emigration through Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, to the western boundary of Missouri. To this was added a decided Southern emigration, especially west of Ohio. For fifty years, the more progressive classes of the poor, and the liberal wing of the old Virginia and Kentucky families, have poured into the valley of the Ohio, and blended readily with the elements there found. A somewhat sparse emigration from New England and New York has also come in. On the heels of this has marched the great army from Germany, which has crowded the cities and swarmed upon the fields of this beautiful and fertile country. The Irish are less numerous, in proportion, than in the more northern cities. None of these elements of population, save the Northern and a portion of the German, are remarkably progressive; and, altogether, this belt of the Union contains the most irreconcilable population in the land; fully justifying the saying of the old Cincinnati judge, who always prefaced his charge to the jury with the sage remark, "Gentlemen of the jury, we live amid a very hotorogenous population."

This emigration has furnished to the West several elements, most valuable as foils and complements to the more radical North. The patient and plodding industry and invincible economy of the New-Jersey and Pennsylvania people have made a garden of vast districts, and piled up large accumulations of wealth. The tempestuous speculations which have desolated so many of the more enterprising Northern