IMPARTIAL SUFFRAGE.

The vindication of justice in a free government requires a free ballot. Loyal men must be allowed to express their wishes as to their representatives. They must choose their own rulers, and, subordinately to the Constitution, make the laws of their own States, and bear their just part in the lawmaking, judicial, and executive departments of the General Government.

The growth of ideas on this subject has been very rapid in this country during the period of emancipation. The basis of suffrage has been changed; the privilege has been greatly extended: but the questions raised have not yet been settled. The partiality of the old nation seems to have been marked in the new for destruction. The persistent purpose manifested by disloyal men to reclaim the control of government in their respective States, and to resume the positions in the General Government which would enable them, as in other days, to control the nation, has been used, in the providence of God, as the means of giving the ballot to the black men of the South. This decision we regard as irreversible; and it is utterly impossible to over-estimate its importance. The colored people are peaceable and loyal. They seem to want only simple justice. Their good behavior amid the great changes which have been going on in their favor has astonished both enemies and friends. They have no disposition to fight for their rights; but going in vast numbers as they now do to the polls, by the side of their former masters, they can protect themselves. Heaven and earth proclaim this just. It is as surely the order of Providence as was the Great Proclamation. God would not permit the war to close till liberty was proclaimed; he would not permit the South to settle down upon any policy of reconstruction until their former slaves, the victims of hoary oppression, were proclaimed to be men, and, as men, were permitted to exercise the rights of freemen. For

the poor oppressed race it was a proud day when they first went to the polls in the District of Columbia, and wielded the ballot, which demonstrated their emancipation, and proclaimed their right and ability peacefully to defend their freedom. Here men would have arrested this innovation; but right onward it moved, until the very obstinacy of rebels became its most potent instrument, and in every State of the South the stalwart men of the proscribed race were seen marching to the polls. So much is irrevocable.

It seems now difficult to tell when our people of color in the Northern States will be admitted to the same privilege; nor can it now be said what will be the basis of suffrage when the nation is finally settled: it surely will not be the color of the skin. The new light of the Great Revolution has destroyed forever the darkness of this gross absurdity. It certainly will include loyalty to the nation. Treason in the Great Republic has slain its right to vote. It may be that the American people will be able to find some standard of intelligence which belongs to true responsible civil manhood, and that the right of the ballot will be as broad as this ascertained legal manhood. But whatever may be its basis, when the new nation is completed, the asserted, conceded right of suffrage will be impartial.

UNIVERSAL EDUCATION.

Free as our noble country is, there has hitherto been too much of caste in the privileges of education. We have felt the power of wealth and rank to some extent, and more of prejudice, in the superior opportunities for learning afforded the children of fortune. Our great common-school system has battled bravely with this odious discrimination; but it has not been broad enough nor high enough to realize the true idea of universal education. The slave-system at least must be dashed down before we dared to say and insist that every child in the United States should learn to read and

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write. But that formidable barrier to progress is gone; and now the school-book, the pen, and the pencil follow the gospel in the track of the sword. Christian people, naturally and of right foremost in every great missionary work, promptly moved American citizens to care for the four millions freed from the shackles of slavery, and save them and the nation from the perils which must arise from their ignoFreedmen's-aid societies in various forms, local and general, sprang up in every part of the country; and vigorous educational measures were adopted, and extended to many parts of the South. These associations showed in the abundance of their funds, and supplies in kind, and in the astonishing self-sacrifice and moral courage of volunteer instructors, how deep and pervading were the convictions of the American people that slaves were not freed to become the victims of anarchy and reckless passion. "The needy must be fed, and all must be educated, and prepared for citizenship," was the prompt and universal judgment of the North, the East, and the West, and of many noble patriots in the South.

These voluntary associations, in their pioneer investigations and labors, brought to the nation and the government a large amount of information in regard to the destitute, suffering condition of millions of freed people and " poor whites." They exposed promptly, and frequently at the risk of their lives, the cruel injustice of many former masters, and lawless villains who had never owned a slave. They powerfully moved and influenced the government to the organization of "The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands," which, under the superintendence of our noble Christian major-general, O. O. Howard, became their effective co-laborer in this field of sacrifice and generous toil. This, as was fitting, identified the nation with the great paternal work of relieving and educating the nation's wards. They gave to the missionary workers in these perilous fields military protection from the hand of ruthless violence, paid

the fare of teachers, and, as far as practicable, furnished buildings for the work of instruction.

At length the Christian churches, whose ministers and members had given largely and wrought effectively through these voluntary societies, and co-operated with all their hu manizing, secular measures, believing that the time had come to make the philanthropic labors of the nation more thoroughly Christian than heretofore, began a system of education in connection with evangelical missionary work among the freedmen and other people of the South. This, while it brought a new and vital force into the field, furnished the societies with another accession of co-operative labor; so that now we have working side by side, and in departments of the same general field, all the freedmen's-aid societies, the Freedmen's Bureau, and all the great evangelical churches.

At last reports, their combined labors had established and maintained among these needy people 1,399 schools, in charge of 1,658 teachers, numbering 90,513 pupils. There are, moreover, reported 782 Sunday schools, with 70,610 scholars. Thus moves on the work of education among the freedmen. Of these pupils, 15,248 are paying tuition amounting to $11,377.03 per month.

Let our readers accept these facts as a part of the evidence that universal education will become the characteristic of the new nation.

THE NEW AMERICAN CHURCH.

There is a sense in which we can speak of the Church of England as we shall never be able to speak of the Church of the United States of America. Episcopalianism is established by law in England. It is the legal religion of the kingdom: all other forms of worship are tolerated merely. This, let us trust, will never be true of any denomination in the Great Republic. We are nobly emancipated from a form of churchship so thoroughly condemned by revelation, philosophy, and history; and it need not be feared that we

shall ever hereafter be re-inthralled. Most happy are we to notice that the upheavals of society in England promise deliverance to the Church in that nation from political dictation.

It must not, however, be assumed, that, in America, we have only a confused mass of conflicting sects. Such an opinion of American Christianity would be wholly superficial and untrue. While we glory in the freedom of opinion, and admit the historical circumstances which have made us several large ecclesiastical organizations, we exalt the grace of God. which has made us one Church. In the great object of worship, the triune Jehovah, in simple, absolute dependence upon a common Saviour, in the pervading power of the new life, we are and always have been one.

But the Church of the new nation will have a broader, more powerful unity than the Church of the past. The fundamental facts of our old brotherhood are more evident and

imposing than before. The upheavals of a great moral revolution have summarily disposed of the feeling of difference, always stronger than the reality. Our method of unity is not that of despotic authority, but of development. We have reversed the theories of Europe. For a thousand years, they have sought unity by repression; we have found it in liberty and the unity of Christian work is the grandest, most potential fact of the age. The new American Church will therefore be, not the Church of prescriptive dogma, but, in a sense higher, stronger, than the old, the Church of vitalized and harmonized action.

The Great Revolution has released the intellect and heart and enterprise of the American Church from the restraints imposed by a powerful internal despotism. It will now, therefore, be broader and freer in its outspoken veracity, its gushing sympathies, and aggressive labor, than heretofore. God has spoken to her in a voice that will ring in her ears till the day of judgment, saying, "Move to the front in this great battle of liberty! If you allow again the reign of