Federal arm will operate to deter the unruly and to tranquillize the timid. Freedom and facility of access to every part of this vast and opulent land opens to the enterprise of the South a boundless field of adventure, and imparts to its industrial and commercial energies a quickening impulse of development and fruition. Meanwhile, an expedient devised to balk the ambition of the white race recoils upon its source, and by augmenting the political power of the South, enables its aspiring spirits to play a splendid and superior part on the theatre of Federal affairs.

If, in contrast with the brilliant future offered to the South in the Union, you contemplate for a moment the destiny to which it would be condemned by another civil convulsion, caused by another revolt against the Federal power; the havoc and carnage of a war aggravated by a conflict between races and issuing inevitably in the catastrophe of a remorseless subjugation, you cannot, on the supposition that the Southern people are rational beings, impute to them any other policy or purpose than to cleave to the Union as their only and their all-sufficient shelter and support.

Nor to the restoration of the Union is the Confederate soldier any the less reconciled by the destruction of slavery. True, the material interests of the South were essentially implicated in the maintenance of the system; but, philosophically, it was the occasion, not the cause, of secession. For the cause of secession you must look beyond the incident of the anti-slavery agitation to that irrepressible conflict between the principles of State sovereignty and Federal supremacy, which menacing the Union in the conception as the twin children of the patriarch wrestled for the mastery in their mother's womb, again endangered its existence in 1798 on occasion of the Alien and Sedition laws; and again in 1819 on occasion of the admission of Missouri: and still again in 1833 on occasion of the protective tariff; and which, arrested by no concession and accommodated by no compromise, continued to rage with increasing fury, until, provoking the revolt of the South, it terminated finally in the absolute and resistless ascendancy of the national power. In 1861 the people of the South resented the intervention of the Federal Government to restrict the extension of slavery; but it was the principle, not the object, of the interference that encountered their opposition; and any other usurpation of Federal power on the sovereign rights of the States would equally have challenged their resistance. Nor, suffer me to say, was slavery any more the point of your attack than of our defence; for, otherwise, in beginning the war the Federal Government would not have been so scrupulous to proclaim through all its organs, its purpose not to touch any the least of the securities of slave property. No, people of the North, impartial history will record that slavery fell

not by any effort of man's will, but by the immediate intervention and act of the Almighty himself; and, in the anthem of praise ascending to Heaven for the emancipation of four million human beings, the voice of the Confederate soldier mingles its note of devout gratulation. The Divinity that presided over the destinies of the Republic at its nativity graciously endowed it with every element of stability save one; and now that in the exuberance of its bounty the same propitious Providence is pleased to replace the weakness of slavery by the unconquerable strength of freedom, we may fondly hope that the existence of our blessed Union is limited only by the mortality that measures the duration of all human institutions.

But why argue on speculative grounds to prove the patriotism of the Confederate soldier, since within these few months he has, by so memorable an illustration, vindicated his fidelity to the Union? You cannot have forgotten-for the land still trembles with the agitations of the crisis that when of late a disputed succession to the Presidency appalled the country with the imminence of civil war: when business stood still and men held their breath in apprehension of a calamity of which the very shadow sufficed to eclipse all the joy of the nation: you cannot but remember, how, obdurate to the entreaties of party, and impenetrable to the promptings of resentment, and responsive only to the inspirations of patriotism, the Confederate soldier in Congress spoke peace to the affrighted land. Your difficulty was his opportunity; he had only to say the word, and the fatal fourth of March would have passed without the choice of a Federal executive, and the Union have been involved in the agonies of a dynastic struggle. But, with a sublime magnanimity he spurned the proffered revenge-and yet do you say the Confederate soldier is false to his allegiance? Pardon me if, even in this presence, I make bold to protest that he was never faithless to his trust to declare that when you thought him treacherous to the Union, he was only true to his State; and to tell you that when he braved all the wrath of your majestic power, it was only in heroic fidelity to a weak but, with him, an all-commanding cause. If your reproach be just, and the Confederate soldier were a conscious culprit, then indeed is reconciliation a folly and a crime; for if false to you once he may betray you again; and instead of alluring him to your embrace by these overtures of fraternity, you should repel him from your presence as a perfidious outcast. No, patriots of the Union! The Confederate soldier offers not to your confidence a conscience stained with the guilt of recreancy. Veterans of the Union! he comes not into your compan ionship with a confession of criminality; but for the credentials of his loyalty to the Union he proudly adduces the constancy with which he clung to the fortunes of his ill-starred Confederacy.

Oliver Bell Bunce.

BORN in New York, N. Y., 1828.

MEN AND WOMEN AT HOME.

[Bachelor Bluff: His Opinions, Sentiments, and Disputations. 1882.]

"JACK

ACK BUNKER is a whole-souled fellow, who knows when a thing is recherché, and who has the wit to appreciate a bit of bachelor felicity. He always breakfasts in his library—this being the name his man James gives to his book-room-where he has a few books, a few pictures, and gathers all the little tasteful articles that he owns-a vase or two, a statuette, a rare print, a bit of china, all of which he tones up with warm upholstery. I, for my own part, like to eat in my best apartment; to partake of my meals under the pleasantest and most enlivening conditions. Eating and drinking is with me a fine art. That 'good digestion may wait on appetite and health on both,' I put my mind in its sweetest, its calmest, its most contented mood, by means of all the agree able surroundings I can command. Hence I looked around Jack Bunker's cozy apartment, tasting all the points. There was a glowing blaze from bituminous coal in the low, polished grate. On a brass pendant stood the shining coffee-pot, from which issued low, murmuring music and delicious odors. The firelight was glancing up on the pictureframes, and the gilt backs of the books, on the warm-tinted walls and the ceiling, and on drapery that fell over the doorway, and partly shut out, partly let in at the windows the bright glances of light from the morning sun. Then the brilliant white cloth on the table, and the easychairs for host and guest, and a new picture only sent home the day before, standing on an easel near, and the morning paper warming by the fire—well, it was a pleasant picture. Jack rubbed his hands, evidently enjoying the air of comfort, brightness, and warmth that filled the whole space, and delighted with my appreciation of it all; and sat himself down in his cozy chair and invited me to mine, and looked around at the books and the pictures, and hoped I was pleased.

"I am not going to describe the breakfast further. My sole purpose has been to draw two pictures, in order to show that domestic bliss is not better understood or oftener realized by Benedicks than bachelors. But no doubt some one will ask why all these conditions of domestic happiness are not possible with 'lovely women' to enhance the bliss of the scene."

"But think," said young Carriway, who had a weakness for sentiment "think of some beautiful creature sitting by the side of the urn,

serving your coffee, applauding your pictures, listening to you as you read a bit of news from the morning journal, perhaps with her hands in yours, or with her dainty foot on the fender, chatting with you softly but joyously over many pleasant themes."

"Humph!" replied Bluff, "it must be admitted that this is a pretty picture. But what if the 'lovely woman' comes down to the breakfastroom frouzy and fierce? What if she appears in a dressing-gown and curl-papers? What if she has a chronic fondness for déshabillé? What if she prove one of those whose nerves never get calm or in accord until after the morning is well passed? In my bachelor-home, domestic bliss is mine, beyond doubt; if I open the door to a 'lovely woman,' there is no telling what Pandora's box I shall uncover. Besides, it is a conviction of mine that refined and perfect domestic comfort is understood by men only."

แ

Heresy! heresy!" exclaimed half a dozen voices at once.

"Heresy it may be, but my opinion is well-grounded for all that. Women are not personally selfish enough to be fastidious in these things. They are usually neat to circumspection; but it is a cheerless and aggressive neatness-moral and inflammatory rather than luxurious and artistic. They are neat because they constitutionally hate dust, not because neatness is important to their own selfish comfort. Women are rarely epicureans. They have no keen enjoyment of eating and drinking in dreams and laziness; they do not understand intellectual repose. It is not the quiet, the serenity, the atmosphere of home, that they at heart care about. Give a woman a new ribbon, and she will go without her dinner. Promise her a ball, and she will sit nightly for a month in a fireless room, muffled up in a shawl, and never murmur. She is fond of dress, not of comfort; of decoration, not of peace; of excitement, not felicity. And then, moreover, she is too willing to be ill-at-ease; too easily satisfied in all those things that pertain to personal comfort, and is far too much disposed to make the best of everything to enter fully into the necessity of creating domestic comfort. She likes home because there she has authority, there she receives her friends and shows her furniture, there she can give parties, and thereby get invitations to other parties. When matrimony introduces a man to recherché breakfasts, to perfect little dinners, to delightful social evenings, to perfectly-appointed parlors, then I shall believe that true domestic bliss is feminine in conception."

"To my mind," remarked Auger, a grave doctor of laws, "your notions about domestic bliss are dangerous and revolutionary. They will be construed into arguments against marriage; and marriage, you know, is the great conserver of public morality, and the great promoter of public welfare."

"But if I once succeed," retorted Bluff, "in showing womankind that

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our domestic comfort is not, as society goes, a necessary consequence of marriage, the whole sex will set at work to make it so."

"No doubt," Auger replied, "if woman had reason to believe that she did not bestow this boon upon man, she would be sure to seek out the way to secure for him the felicity she knows so well how to appreciate for herself."

"Now, there you are wrong," exclaimed Bluff. "Women have no true appreciation of this domestic felicity, even while they have remained calm in the assurance that men, hungering for the peace of home, must come to them for it. They have, with very great egotism, scorned with a supreme scorn the idea of men being able to have anything orderly, neat, or tasteful around them without women to supply the conditions. They have carried this idea so far as to look upon celibacy as not only a cheerless thing, but as by necessary implication a wicked thing; and yet instead of women being, as they suppose, the source of domestic bliss, they are radically and constitutionally its obstacles and enemies."

"There could be no home without women," exclaimed Carriway, with great warmth.

"I shall not quote history," replied the Bachelor, coolly, "to show that domesticity in women has always been enforced; that in Eastern countries it is secured by compelled seclusion; that in all times it has been the tyranny of man which has subjected her to the boundary of home: but I will simply give you a reason or two why in the nature of things women have not the keen sympathy with domestic felicity that men have—that is, if you care to hear them."

"Go on."

"Men and women, as a consequence of their distinct daily occupations, have very different aspirations and expectations in regard to matrimony. How many of our young women, for instance, think of domestic wellbeing as the desired end of marriage? Do they not contemplate the gayeties rather than the serenities which marriage is to assure them? Are not their marriage-dreams of balls, of parties, of the opera, of visiting, of travelling? of carriages, dresses, jewels, household splendor? of social success, and the triumph of position attained? Instead of Lares and Penates, do they not dream of the dazzle and the dash of life? And this is a natural consequence of their peculiar position. Marriage is to give them their career, and hence within it centre all their ambitions, all their hopes, all the largeness of their future. But, with man, marriage is something very different. Men are out in the world, busy in the great battle of life-absorbed in its contests, filled sometimes with the triumph of success, and sometimes with the chagrin of defeat. Spurred by the stern necessity of achieving, they have surrendered all their energies to the struggle; they are busy with stratagems and manoeuvres, keenly