It is no business of ours to speculate upon
the matter, but these questions of state among
the men of our own race beyond the sea, make
us the more disposed to take A Journey into the
Back Country with MR. OLMSTED. The evidence
of a shrewd practical observer as to the condition
of the south will help us materially. Mr.
Olmsted, who had already described as a faithful
eye-witness what he saw during rides through
Texas and the southern states of the seaboard,
has lately been exploring the back settlements of
slavery, and records his experience in a new book
which is just now of high interest. He rode as a
single traveller, resting at the houses of overseers
or slave-owners upon plantations in a land
where there are wide spaces between town and
town with but few inns or halting-places. The
want of inns breeds (as it did in the old days of
half-civilised Europe) a necessity for exercise of
hospitality. But, the hospitality—the boasted
hospitality of the south—is not, like that of the
old world in its half-barbarous days, freely ex-
changed, but takes for all strangers the universal
formula, after a supper, bed, and breakfast, of—

"What is to pay?"

"A dollar and a quarter will be about it, I
reckon."

Men habitually adding to their other vocations
that of a rough-and-ready innkeeper, who makes
a certain charge for very rough accommodation,
have not much right to claim that they illustrate
in their persons southern hospitality. As little
right to make such a claim, have the few great
planters resident on their estates, surrounded by
their negroes, and cheered by little or no society
of neighbours, when they invite guests from afar
to their mansions to relieve them from the
dreariness inseparable from their natural
position.

In the valley of the Lower Mississippi, says
Mr. Olmsted, the plantations are all large and well
tilled, but the residences on them are usually
small and mean. There are no " poor whites"
to be seen, except on tramp across the district.
In this polite region, there is no such thing as a
school; everything is an institute; and this is
the sort of advertisement by which parents may
be invited to send daughters for instruction:

CALHOUN INSTITUTE FOR YOUNG LADIES;
MACON, NOXUBEE COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI.
W. R. POINDEXTER A.M., Principal and Proprietor.
—The above school, formerly known as the
"Macon Female Institute," will be reopened on the first of
October with an entirely new corps of teachers from
Principal down. Having purchased the property at a
public sale, and thus become sole proprietor, the
Principal has determined to use all means he can now
command, as well as he may realise for several years
yet to come, in building, refitting, and procuring such
appurtenances as shall enable him to contribute his
full quota, as a professional man, to the progress of
the great cause of " SOUTHERN EDUCATION."

This is the region occupied by the branch of
animal creatures called, by a fellow-traveller of
Mr. Olmsted's, " Swell-heads."

"Swell-heads, I call them, nothing but swell-
heads, and you can't get a night's lodging, sir."
Refinement is less common among the newly-
rich of Mississippi than in the seaboard slave
states, where there are fewer wealthy families.
The Mississippi properties are said to range in
value from a hundred thousand to ten million
dollars: the negroes upon any one plantation
numbering from fifty to a hundred. When they
outnumber a hundred, they are divided, and stock
two or more plantations, commonly adjoining
one another. Each slave hand tends about
fifteen acres, ten of cotton and five of corn.
The yield is a bale and a half to the acre on
fresh land and in the bottom; afterwards less,
as the case may be. But, the system is spendthrift;
there is no care to maintain the powers
of the soil; and it is understood that " old land,
after a while, isn't worth bothering with." The
large planters live freely, and often have eaten
through, not only their current means, but the
worth of their crops for the next three or four
years to come. Many of these wasteful men of
wealth have begun life as overseers. Their sons
drink, gamble, and, if they are not killed in
fights, fall into poverty. Anything like an old
family property is hardly to be seen.

The horseman approaches Natchez through
occasional park-like woods, among wavy oaks,
and over roads bordered like Herefordshire
lanes. Within three miles of the town, the road
is lined with villas in well-grown shrubberies,
formed without taste and broken with paltry
miniature terraces. As the population appears,
boys drive along recklessly, or gallop screaming
and swearing followed by a mulatto groom.
Ladies sit well dressed in the open carriage
that rolls by, with a gorgeous black coachman
on the box and a belaced baby in the lap of a
French bonne. In the excellent hotel, there are
many young men, dressed after the manner of
New York clerks on their days of gorgeousness,
all " talking horse." There is a neglected
public garden on the Bluff, from which there is
one of the finest views in the United States,
but it is found possessed by pigs. Mr. Russell,
writing of North America, says he had been led
to believe that at Natchez you meet with " as
refined society as in any other part of the
United States," but he found that "the chief
frequenters of the best hotel were low, drunken
fellows." Mr. Olmsted found in the town, no
reading-room, no recent newspaper except the
local record of cotton and river news and steamboat
puffs; no recent books or magazines of any
sort at the booksellers'. The libraries of this
important county capital contain but two thousand
volumes in all, and although children come
from the country districts and the lesser towns
of Adams county to be taught in the Natchez
"Institutes," a town of eighteen or nineteen
thousand inhabitants has only about one thousand
in the schools. The next county behind
that of which Natchez is capital, has a population
of six thousand, and only a hundred and
thirty-two children attending school. A town
in the north, with nearly the same population
as Natchez, has three times as many
schoolchildren, ten times as many books in its public