(5) In 1860 the South was the richest section of the country, and her wealth was increasing with greater rapidity than that of the other sections.
It will be remembered that in one of his great speeches in Congress William L. Yancey demonstrated this truth.
(6) Wages were higher in the South than in the North in 1860.
So they are even now. The laborer who produces that free trade product, cotton, gets nearly one-half of the value of the cotton produced. In the Protected industries of the North the laborer does not receive an average of twenty-five percent of the product of his labor.
Mr. Dyer proves another fact worth mention:
The idea of a State fund for the education of those who were not able to pay their tuition originated in the South. In other words, the present American system of State free public schools was born in the South. If Mr. Dyer’s more comprehensive work increases in value as it increases in size it will deserve to be a most successful book.
“Sonnets to a Wife.” By Ernest McGaffey. William Marion Reedy. St. Louis, Mo.
Mr. McGaffey makes his Sonnets a continuous hymn of the beautiful in Nature. The clean atmosphere of the open world is in every sonnet. All the airs of heaven blow pureness about these lovers. The spiritual significance of the great Nature, of which husband and wife and their love for each other are a part, is always strongly suggested, and this without cant either of orthodoxy or of the dolorous minor poet lamenting the loss of himself to the world.
The Eternal Spring. A Novel. By Neith Boyce. Fox, Duffield & Co., New York, $1.50, postpaid.
The story opens at an Italian villa, overlooking Florence. Elizabeth Craven is wearing “second mourning” for a deceased husband who was too old for her, and who had never satisfied her womanly cravings for male companionship. Elizabeth is thirty-eight years old, but is still in the flush of health and strength and beauty. Hers is the villa, and to her comes Barry Carlton, who has been stock-gambling for several years in Chicago, and has quit because he had won a modest competence and had brought himself to the brink of nervous collapse.