what danger may not be apprehended from the presence of a Pariah caste, whose debasement and incapacity for self-protection invites to their subjection! In the North there is always a division into classes, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, high and low, but they are never permanent. They are like the sea and the clouds: the drop which stagnates among the weeds to-day, to-morrow may reflect the hues of the rainbow.

The constant interchange of position, preventing settled castes and class spirit, is our safety. But when in a state, especially one of aristocratic tendencies, there is a caste distinction drawn, permanent and unchangeable, because based upon Nature's brand, setting off a race proscribed, ignorant, and necessitous, there a weight is thrown into the scale on the side of aristocracy which it seems impossible to counterbalance. That this is not an imaginary danger is shown by the example of Jamaica. Says Mr. Underhill: "Only the perpetual interposition of the British government has prevented the enfranchised negro from being reduced to the condition of a serf, by the selfish partisan legislation of the Jamaica planters."* We must remember that the Southern States, when once reorganized, will have the power to legislate as iniquitously as did the planters of Jamaica, with no superior Parliament to revise their actions. That conscientious scruples, or considerations of interest, would restrain such legislation, the sad experience of the past hardly gives us ground to hope. Already we see in the South, wherever the military power is withdrawn, the incipient steps of a policy bearing more severely upon the negro than even the condition of nominal slavery, since his physical situation is more pitiable, while his mind is only deluded by the phantom of liberty. We can hardly hope that the influx of Northerners will be a counteracting force, when we consider the class of men, mostly adventurers and speculators, who will form this immigrating population, and remember that transplanted Northerners have always been the most bitter opponents of their native section, and the most firmly wedded to the institutions of the South. Overruling the decision in the "Dred Scot case," or allowing

"The West Indies, their Social and Religious Condition," by Edward B. Underhill, p. 222; quoted by Professor Cairnes, "The Slave Power," p. 167.

that decision to stand, and exercising the power granted to Congress by the Constitution, "to establish an uniform rule of naturalization," and thus making the freedmen citizens, would mitigate the evil to a slight extent; yet a terrible power would still be reserved to the States, sufficient, as has been already said, to produce all the evils attending nominal slavery in the past.

But arm this class with the weapon of the free citizen, as silent and more powerful than the billet of a Borga, and at once all this is changed. He now will be courted, where before he was spurned; interest more potent than philanthropy will now dictate education, where before it demanded debasement; the Pariah will now be treated with outward respect, and the caste barrier be swept away. Without the ballot, four million blacks, increasing more rapidly than the whites, may not only serve as the basis for another aristocracy, fatal to the Union, but also, in the future, bring upon the South the horrors of the war between races so vividly predicted by De Tocqueville.

As has been shown already, if this check upon aristocracy is to be applied at all, it must be done at once, before the new aristocracy acquires the power to successfully oppose it.

We are told that the negro is now unfit for the ballot, because of his ignorance and degradation. And men using this argument would have us fold our arms and wait for his elevation; just as our fathers waited for the abolition of slavery, which they hoped would come some day, they knew not when or how. We have seen how it came. As matters now stand, the negro can never be better fitted for the rights of citizenship, since every interest in the South unites for his depression. Each hour's delay increases the evil, while diminishing the possibility of its correction.

If an amendment to the Constitution could be passed, regulating the status and rights of the negro, in order to secure the end suggested in this paper, it need not confer upon the illiterate black the right of immediate suffrage. We might learn a lesson from the framers of the Constitution, and provide that, after a term of years, no distinction should be made because of color; in the mean time giving the ballot to those who can read and write. The knowledge that in say twenty years

this addition would be made to their voting population would make it for the immediate interest of the South to educate her future voters. But the passage of such an amendment is hardly possible. The one abolishing slavery has not yet been ratified; and, unless ratified, there is, according to the theory of President Johnson, nothing to prevent the re-establishment of even nominal slavery by the reorganized States. Public opinion at the North would not be ready for another amendment until it would be too late.

The only feasible method of accomplishing this vital result seems to be by the action of Congress. The Supreme Court, the tribunal of last peaceable resort, has decided that the conflict of the last four years has been a war, that the South have been belligerents. Being such, their States now, by virtue of our victory, occupy the position of conquered territory, over which Congress has legislative control. And as the ordinance for the government of the Northwestern Territory was effectual to exclude slavery from the Northwestern States, so Congress might pass an ordinance fixing the status of the negro in the South, and would have the power to make this ordinance. effectual.

But we do not desire to consider further the means by which this restraint upon the aristocratic tendency of the South may be secured; we only wish to show its necessity. If this can be made apparent, the mode of its application can be easily settled.

These, then, seem to be two indispensable conditions of the preservation of democratic ideas in the South, and the perpetuity of the Union,-suffrage to the negro, and permission to the Southern States to protect their manufactures till they shall be able to compete with the North. Alone neither can be sufficient; together, the successful result is by no means certain, but it may be hoped for.

ART. III.-Mantova e Sua Provincia, per l'Avvocato BARTOLOMEO ARRIGHI. [Section of the work entitled: Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo - Veneto, ossia Storia delle Città, dei Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni. Per Cura di CESARE CANTU, e d'altri Literati. Milano. 1859.]

IN that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a Theban king, and discourses to his charge:

Manto was she through many lands she went

Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.
Therefore I choose thou be on me intent
A little. When from life her father passed,
And they of Bacchus' city became slaves,
Long time about the world the daughter cast.
Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves

The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:

Benaco called. . .

And Peschiera in strong harness sits

To front the Brescians and Bergamo,

Where one down-curving shore the other meets.
There all the gathered waters outward flow
That may not in Benaco's bosom rest,

And down through pastures green a river go.
Soon as the current southward turns the crest,
Benaco no more, but Mincio we know

As far as to Governo, where, its quest
Ended at last, it falls into the Po.

But far it has not sought before a plain
It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
To be the steaming summer's offence and bane.
Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid

Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
And lived, and left her empty body there.
Then the sparse people that were scattered near
Gathered upon that island, everywhere

Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.
They built their city above the witch's grave,
And for her sake that first made dwelling there
The name of Mantua to their city gave.

To this account of the first settlement of Mantua, Virgil adds a warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city's foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most ruthless of these traces the city's origin, not to the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. "And whoever," says the compiler of the "Flower of the Mantuan Chronicles," (it is a very dry and musty flower, indeed,) citing doughty authorities for all his facts and figures," whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied."

But we are as little disposed to unsettle the reader's faith in the Virgilian tradition, as to part with our own; and we therefore uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to our thoughts as we rode toward the city, one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring; and when we came in sight of the ancient hold of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at its feet, we recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil's description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is multitudinously hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat meadow-land before it reaches NO. 210.

VOL. CII.

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