The great strength of the rebellion lay in the ignorance of the Southern masses. The "poor whites" of the South are among the most ignorant people on the face of God's earth. The slaveholders purposely kept them in ignorance--kept them from books, and schools, and newspapers more carefully, more persistently than they did their slaves. They surrounded their section and their people with a Chinese wall of prejudice, against which all arrays of fact, argument, appeal, threw themselves in vain. Through this ignorance, the "poor whites" of the South were ruled even more despotically than the slaves; and through this ignorance the slaveholders of the South were enabled to commit the greatest of wrongs against humanity. They engendered prejudices between the "poor whites" and the negroes, never losing an opportunity of fostering the hatred and enmity which they were soon enabled to create. A perfect system prevailed all over the South, and the "poor whites" were placed in every position, socially, politically, and otherwise, in which they could be made offensive to the slaves. The harsh overseer was always a "poor white," and, if possible, he was selected from among the "Yankee" emigrants; the sheriff who tied the slave to the whipping-post, and the constable who laid on the lash, were always elected from the "poor whites;" and the men who, with bloodhounds, hunted the runaway negro through marsh and wood, were hired from among the "poor white" neighbors. In their ignorance, these two factions of the same laboring class of the South were made to believe that their interests were antagonistic instead of identical, and that the slaveholders were the mutual enemies of each. Andrew Johnson, in laboring for years in Tennessee to create a feeling of antagonism between the "poor whites" and the rich slaveholders, was touching at one root of the evil, but not the root. The war has thrown open the field to the laborers of the North, and if the people of the country seek to restore harmony, to obliterate all sectional feelings, to make the union of the States really one and indivisible, they must aid in the work of educating the Southern people, black and white, into understanding their former condition and false positions toward each other. A few good men, like General Wager Swayne (who understands this great question thoroughly, who is a charming enthusiast on the subject, and who ought to be at the head of an Educational Bureau instead of a subordinate in the Freedmen's Bureau), and General Davis Tillson, and one or two others, are doing much good by encouraging education among the negroes. But the sympathy of the country should not be entirely absorbed by the blacks. There are four millions of "poor whites" in the South who need education fully as much as do the negroes, and, deceived, betrayed, and ruined by their leaders, they deserve sympathy and aid fully as much. One inalienable right which should not be denied even to traitors--and if there had been education at the South there would have been no treason--is the right to educate himself; and since the Constitution provides that there shall be no attainder of blood for treason, the North owes it to the rising generation of these deceived people to educate them into a proper appreciation of the liberty which our veterans have won for them in defeating and conquering their fathers. Oh, how grand and sublime would appear the record in history that the Great Republic, after putting down the most monstrous rebellion the world ever saw, imposed upon the conquered only the tax for their own education, and erected no prisons save those of the school-house and the church!