February Atlantic.

Harvard men will read with pleasure a paper in the Atlantic Monthly by Prof. Shaler on "The Border State Men of the Civil War." Prof. Shaler is himself a Kentuckian, as all college men know, and therefore he is eminently fitted to give excellent final testimony on such a subject. What Prof. Shaler says on the considerations which finally influenced him to cast his lot for the North is particularly interesting:

"The argument which in the end determined my allegiance was this: The apparent and probably true ideal of the Southern people was the maintenance of States' rights. With this desire I was in sympathy; but, granting that the South should win its independence, it was evident that the Northern and the Southern States would be driven by their permanent hostility to each other to change from the type of federal Union to that of consolidated governments. In this alteration all chance of local autonomy would disappear, probably never to exist again on this continent. Moreover, I saw plainly, as did every other rational person of my acquaintance, that the strife concerning slavery would afford a perennial source of war-breeding trouble between the North and the South."