Home Politics, BQR 1875 (Slavery, Government)

Politics abroad present little that is encouraging to the statesman or the Christian.  Caesarism and Liberalism, or, perhaps, we should write, Caesarism and Communism, have formed, by natural affinity, a league offensive and defensive against civil and religious liberty, the family and property, the rights of God and society, and are chiefly engaged in a sacrilegious war on the pope, the divinely appointed guardian of all rights,-the rights of conscience, of the family, of nations and individuals, of sovereigns and of subjects.  They are doing incalculable evil to society and the souls of men, but they will fail in their purpose and be shamefully defeated in the end, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.  Yet we seem to have fallen on those times predicted in the New Testament, that, "except those days be shortened, no flesh can be saved."

At home things appear, at least, to be about as bad as they can be.  No doubt the journals, whose mission it is to create a sensation whenever possible, exaggerate the corruption of public men, and paint the political and financial delinquencies of the day in the blackest colors possible; and no wise man believes that things are, from a worldly point of view, half so bad as represented: not all the representatives of the people are peculators, rogues, and swindlers, nor are the people universally venal.  We believe there are some honest officials, and some people in the country who are not corrupt or easily corruptible.  We do not believe President Grant is a positively bad man: he certainly has the virtue of standing by his friends; but unhappily his friends, when not notoriously incompetent, are for the most part rogues, swindlers, thieves, or blackguards.  His great fault is that he lacks a high moral sense, genuine public spirit, and that he looks upon himself as simply detailed to perform certain duties as president.  Yet we think it not unlikely that his successor will render his administration respectable, and cause it to be regretted, as Harrison's and Tyler's administration made VanBuren's administration respectable, as Frank Pierce's administration made the Taylor-Fillmore administration respectable; and so on down to the present.  We wrote in the Democratic Review in 1843, enlightened by the "Hard-Cider" campaign, "No first-class man can hereafter be elected to the presidential chair:" and certainly, thus far, experience has verified our prediction or conclusion.  The last real states-man elected president was John Quincy Adams.  Though he was in some respects intractable and crotchety, yet he was, upon the whole, an able man, and an accomplished statesman.  Webster, Clay, and others, told us, in 1828, that the move-ment to elect General Jackson was a revoloutionary move-ment, and that his election would be a revoloution: and they were right.  The republic of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, the honest republic, expired March 4th, 1829, when the hero of New Orleans was inaugurated president of the Union.  The course of our politics has been down-wards ever since, proving but too effectually,

Then for honest and capable men were substituted noisy partisans without principle, experience, or capacity, as officers and employes of the government.  Then came into vogue the senseless maxim of rotation in office, and offices were conferred and claimed as compensation of party services.  Then constitutions became so much waste paper, and the supremacy of the popular will, as expressed through caucuses, journals, and noisy demagogues, was recognized and asserted even by the president.  We deny not that President Jackson was a man of eminent natural ability, or that he had many noble qualities; but he was a prince of rowdies rather than a statesman, and had no understanding or love of constitutional governement.  He had a rare energy and force of will, but his disposition was to govern as an absolute prince, rather than as the chief magistrate of a constitutional republic.  He and his partisans placed the republic on the declivity to an absolute democracy, unrestrained by constitutional restrictions on power, in which the majority for the time govern as absolutely as the Autocrat of all the Russias.  Prior to his election, it is worthy of remark that no great party in the country called itself, or allowed itself to be called, the democratic party.  The members of the Jeffersonian party, the successful opponents of the old federalists, disclaimed the name in our youth, when applied to them by the federalists, accused of being monarchists, and regarded as an insult.  The election of General Jackson, whose strong will was his law, inaugurated a revolution, and since 1838, when the Whig party, which had hitherto retained some old federalist tradistions, tired of being out of power and out of place, changed their tactics, and outbid in their democracy the Jacksonian democracy, all parties have alike claimed to be democratic; and that stanch Whig, Horace Greeley, the principle creator of the so-called republican party, which has ruled or misruled the country since 1861, contended that his party was the Simon Pure democracy, and the democratic party, so called, was the sham democracy, because they still retained some reminis-cences of and a respect for constitutional restrictions on the power of the majority.  At present there is no constitutional party in the country; the will of the majority is absolute, and the tendency is to make the president, a la Jackson, or a la Napoleon, the sole organ or representative of that will, to the exclusion of the legislative and judiciary departments of the government.  It, perhaps, needs only another Jackson or another Grant to carry out to its final result that anti-republican tendency.  The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the stubborn resistance of the lately deceased Andy Johnson, and General Grant's want of enterprise, have probably alone prevented it from being hitherto completely realized.

The abolition movement, which laughed at constitutions and legal restraints, originated in this absolute democracy, for the abolitionists had only, by continual agitation, by harping on the horrors of slavery, and fierce denunciation of slave-holders and slave-holding, to work up a majority of voters, infuriated against slavery, to have the right, on democratic principles, to liberate the slave without indemnifying the owners for the loss of their property, and in spite of the constitution.  This same absolute democracy, or, as we prefer to call it, democratic Caesarism, it was that provoked the secession of the slave-holding States, and thus indirectly caused the late civil war, so disastrous to both North and South, but probably in reality more disastrous to the North than to the South, or than it would have been if there had been any wise and honest statesmanship on the part of the general government.  The same democratic Caesarism that had gained the ascendency in the great Central and Northwestern States, and with which the republican party was thoroughly saturated, was carried into congress; and the party having an overwhelming majority-we need no say how obtained-determined, at the cessation of the war, to provide for the perpetuation of their ascendency, and to administer the government of the Union and of the several States in the interests of the republican party.  The pretext was the protection of the recently emancipated slave for whom the party as a party cared nothing, any further than they could use him to perpetuate their power.

We were the first publicist, or among the very first publicists, not an abolitionist, who advocated the emancipation of the slaves as a war measure, or as a military necessity; for we saw clearly enough, from the very beginning of the war, that, such was the military incapacity of the administration, the indecision and humanitarianism of the well meaning president, and such the determination and energy of the secessionists, unless we could break up or disorganize their labor system, and render their slaves useless, and even an embarrassment to them, it would be impossible for the government to subdue them and restore the integrity of the Union.  The president was afraid to prosecute the war with vigor, lest he should hurt somebody, especially mythical union-men in the States that had seceded.  Mr. Seward believed in pamphlets and sophomoric orations, when bullets were the only persuasive arguments that could be used.  He pretended that secession was illegal, and therefore that no State has seceded; and appeared tp persuade himself that the ordinances of secession were the work of a faction, that the mass of the Southern people were loyal and attached to the Union, and anxious to return to it, and would do so, if the power of the faction were once broken: and hence he, an avowed abolition-leader, wrote officially to our minister at the Court of St. James, that the rebellion would be suppressed and peace restored without disturbing the status of a single person in the Union.  All this we saw was little better than midnight madness.  Secession was the act of the people of the South, who were far more united in waging a war against the Union for independence, than were the people of the States that did not secede, in prosecuting the war for its restoration and preservation.  We told the government that there were no union-men at the South worth counting, and that all efforts to organize the supposed union-men, and to make them representatives of the States that had seceded, were worse than thrown away, as experience soon but too amply proved.  But the administration believed otherwise, and dilly-dallied till men began to be disgusted with it, as the cry, "On to Richmond," indicated.  That cry was not the expression of impatience for a fight, so much as of impatience at the hesitation of the government and its idle negotiations, and of the desire for the government to commit itself to a decided war-like policy, and leave the question to the arbitrament of arms.  War is always terrible, but it is sometimes a necessity: and the most humane way of making war is to make it in earnest, and as distressing, while it lasts, as possible to the enemy, so far as allowed by the recognized usages of civilized warfare, for that tends to shorten its duration, and to secure peace.  The administration never understood that, and in its false humanity prolonged it for years, and lost hundreds of thousands of valuable lives which might have been spared.

We did not advocate emancipation of the slaves on abolition principles, nor out of consideration for the slaves themselves, but as a necessary war measure, as the only means left us of breaking the power of the Confederacy, and of restoring the Union.  Delayed as was that measure, imperfectly and bunglingly as it was carried out, the result proved that we were right, and that the disorganization of its system of labor, gradually worked by the president's proclamation, was the decisive measure that caused the final collapse of the Confederacy.  The collapse of the Confederacy introduced several problems, which it required statesmanship of a very high order to solve.  But this high order of statesmanship was wholly wanting in the administration, and in congress, taken as a whole.  The democratic Caesarism, or absolute democracy, which makes the will of the people, however expressed, inside or outside of constituions, absolute sovereign, and the only thing to be consulted by the legislature or the executive, had reduced all statesmanship to the art of manipulating the people and securing success to one's party, or the defeat of the opposing party, that is, to adroit and skilful political management, or, more expressively, to the art of demagogy.  This must always be the case under an absolute democracy, whether the people assemble in person, or act through elected representatives.  The whole thought of the country had been absorbed in aboltion dissertations, or declamations on liberty and humanity, and in eliminating from our institutions whatever tended to impede the direct and immediate action of the popular will, popular opinion, popular passion, or popular caprice.  There had been no call since the democratic triumph in 1820, for statesmanship, for, since then, government had ceased to be a science, and any man was counted fit to be a representative in congress, a senator, or a president, if able to command the requisite number of votes.  A plurality of votes would supply any possible lack of experience or of brains.

Mr. Lincoln was a man of good natural parts, a shrewd political manipulator, and a passable nisi-prius lawyer, but of little education, of very little literary or scientific culture, and of no statesmanship.  His best friends could not pretend that he was even a passable constitutional lawyer, or that he understood at all the position in which secession paced the States that had seceded, or the ground on which the general government had the right to coerce them back into the Union.  And yet we doubt if any member of his cabinet or of congress understood it better than himself, unless Senator Sumner is to be regarded as an exception.  The Blairs were able politicians and able men, but they saw in the struggle only John C. Calhoun, whom they had fought under Andrew Jackson, and whom, though a Union man during his whole life, and though dead and buried before a single secession ordinance was passed, they continued to fight to the end of the war.  Mr. Sumner understood that "State secession is State suicide," but he was almost alone in this view; and this he maintained as giving congress the right to deal with the slave question, not as a ground on which to justify the war waged by the government against the secessionists.  Indeed, neither the administration nor congress ever took, distinctly and decidedly, a ground on which that war was legally defensible.  It was held to be a war against a rebellion, but no ground was assumed on which secessionists as such are rebels.  Simple secession is not rebellion.  Admission of a State into the Union imposes upon it no obligation of allegiance to the national sovereign; it simply gives it a share in the national sovereignty, which, as a territory under our system, it has not.  Secession is simple abdication by a State of its sovereignty, and that is neither treason nor rebellion.

The mistake of the South was, not in asserting the right of a State to secede, or in assuming that secession took the State as a State out of the Union, but that, by an ordinance of secession, the State remained a State with all its sovereign powers outside and independent of the Union.  By secession it ceased to be one of the United States, and abdicated its sovereignty.  It carried itself as a State out of the Union, but not its population and territory out of jurisdiction of the Union.  It simply, as we have shown in our "American Republic," lost its sovereign power as a State in the Union, and lapsed into the condition of unorganized territory belonging to the Union.  Secession simply carried the State out of the Union to bring it under the Union.  But neither party understood this, for neither party understood where, under our system, the sovereign power is lodged.  The South contended that it is lodged in the States severally; and the North, imbued with democratic Caesarism, held and still holds that it is lodged in the people back of the States, and outside of State organizations: a more fatal mistake than that of the South.  The sovereignty under the American system is vested in the States, but in the States united, not severally.  Mr. Buchanan was right when he said a State could not be coerced.  If the secessionists had stopped with simple secession, they would not have been rebels, and a war against them would have been unjustifiable, and defensible on no legal or constitutional principle.  But they did not stop there; they formed a confederacy, assumed to be independent of the Union, raised and organized an army, and actually levied war against the Union.  Then they became traitors and rebels, and as such, the government had a legal and constitutional right, nay, the solemn duty, to use force to reduce them to submission.

This blunder as to secession would not be worth mentioning had it not entailed a more serious blunder still on the part of the government when the war was over, and the question of reconstruction came up.  Here the government was more at sea than ever.  Having never accepted the constitutional doctrine we have set forth, it knew not whether to regard the States that had seceded as still States and States in the Union, or as territory subject to the Union.  Thaddeus Stevens held them to be conquered territory and subject to the will of the conqueror: which was to concede the Southern doctrine that secession took the States, both as States and territory, out of the Union, and to condemn the war, for no nation conquers its own territory,-territory which already belongs to it.  It may recover it, but not conquer it.  The government could not treat "State secession as State suicide," for it from the first recognized the States as still existing in the Union and persisting in the union-men, treated the Pierrepont government at Wheeling as the State of Virgina, and admitted to seats in congress representatives from any congressional district where the union-men happened to be for the moment in the majority.  It was not at liberty to treat the States as defunct, and their territory as simple unorganized territory subject to the Union.  Yet, if it did not so treat them, how was it to carry out its negro policy, and subject the Southern States any more than the Northern States to the general government, which on any theory of the constitution, is the creature of the States, and has only a delegated authority and no sovereignty over them.  If they were treated as States, the slaves emancipated by the president's proclamation probably could not have been remanded to slavery, but the proclamation could not be regarded as abolishing slavery or as prohibiting it, if the States saw proper to reestablish it.  This view would have alienated from the government the whole anti-slavery party, and all who had trusted that the war would make an end of negro slavery, which was and could only a disturbing element in the Union.  To treat the quondam States as simple territory under the jurisdiction of the Union, was for the government to stultify itself, and to deny the ground it had taken throughout the whole war.  So it held that of contradictories both may be true, and treated them both as States and no-States, as it suited its purposes.  When it wanted their votes for amending the constitution, it held them to be sovereign States; when it wanted to govern them and compel the to vote according to its wishes, it held them to be no-States, but simply unorganized population and territory.

In our view of the constitution, the States that seceded had ceased to exist, and had become like any other unorganized territory belonging to the Union; and at the close of the war it was optional with it to hold them under military governors, or for congress to pass an enabling act, authorizing the people to reorganize themselves as States, with or without the old state names and territorial boundaries.  But, then, the enabling act could impose no conditions precedent of reorganization not imposed by the constitution; and if it did not impose the prohibition of slavery as a condition precedent, but authorized their organization as States on a footing of perfect equality with the States already in the Union, the reorganized States would be free to authorize slavery or not: so this would not do.  There must be an amendment of the constitution prohibiting slavery forever within the jurisdiction of the United States.  But only States in the Union can ratify constitutional amendments, so it was necessary to treat the States that seceded as still States in the Union; but, in order to be recognized as such, and be allowed to exercise their powers as self-governing States, as the States that had not seceded, they must ratify the constitutional amendment proposed by congress, prohibiting slavery.  Yet, if they were States in the Union, neither the executive nor congress had any right to impose any condition of the sort, for the war power ceased the moment the confederates laid down their arms and offered no further resistance, and the government had only the ordinary peace powers of the constitution.  If they were not States in the Union, their ratification was worth nothing.  In any case the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the constitution were never constitutionally adopted, but were imposed by arbitrary power, and are really no part of the constitution, unless the free acquiescence of, at least, three-fourths of the States has given them, which we doubt, a quasi-legality.

The mistake of the government was in assuming to act under the war power after the war was over, and in assuming that the work of reconstruction belonged to it, and not to the people of the States, that had seceded.  The general government has no authority under our system to organize or reorganize a State.  If, as it assumed, the States that seceded, had never been out of the Union, but were still States in the Union, it had no more authority over them than it had over New York or Massachusetts.  It had no authority to say who should or should not have the elective franchise, or be eligible to office state or national.  Its disfranchisement of the real people of the South, and the attempt to organize States with the few union-men of the South, Northern adventurers, scalawags, and recently emancipated slaves, who had never had a country or a domicile, was a gross usurpation and a blunder.  We warned the government, in 1863, against any attempt of the kind.  The real people of the South were secessionists, and it was idle to dream of maintianing anything like self-government without them; and the attempt would only furnish a pretext for the interference of the federal troops, and not only disburb the equilibrium of our political system, but prove most disastrous to the people, especially to South Carolina, Louisiana, even Alabama and Mississippi, has but too amply proved the justness of what we wrote in 1863 after the capture of Vicksburg.  But Mr. Lincoln, with all his bonhomie and genialness, was an intense lover of despotic power.  Congress suffered itself to be carried away by its passions, instead of being controlled by reason and the dictates of honest statesmanship; and even Mr. Sumner said to us in February, 1864, that, in order to keep the Southern people loyal, that is, in order for the North to be able to govern them, it would be necessary to exile some twenty thousand or more of the leading secessionists, and to extend the elective franchise to the freedmen.  The horrible assassination of President Lincoln threw the administration, congress, and the Northern people into a frenzy of wrath; and Vice-President Johnson acceded to the presidency with a double portion of the vindictiveness natural to him,-which, however, he lived long enough to repent,-and talked gradiloquently of rendering treason odious.  His proclamation of May, 1865, exceeded anything ever issued in any age by the most barbarous chieftain.  It virtually disfranchised and outlawed nearly the whole Southern people, certainly every man who could render any efficient service in reorganizing the Southern society, and in repairing the disasters of the war.  President Johnson, as honest a man as ever sat in the presidential chair, devoted to the constitution, and, after time to get cool, not hard-hearted or cruel-though he, from his entry into political life, had had a quarrel with the Southern aristocracy, who looked down upon him as not at all of their class-soon relented of his severity, and sought to render it innocuous, and to save the Southern people; but, in doing so, he lost the confidence of his party, which at the time had two-thirds of the members of both houses of congress, and provoked in revenge a fearful congressional opposition, and caused Congress to adopt a far more stringent policy towards the South than it originally intended.  Men, like Morton of Indiana, and our friend Chandler of Michigan, felt that Mr. Johnson's policy would lose all the fruits of the war, and, worst of all, would resuscitate the democratic party and restore it to power, when it would be all over with the republican party, whose only hope in the future was in negro suffrage and the federal arms.

On the Southern theory of state sovereignty, and on the democratic theory of which the vastly overrated journalist, Horace Greeley, the founder of the republican party, was the champion, the Southern people, in seceding and setting up an independent state or republic for themselves, only exercised their natural right, and consequently were neither traitors to the Union, nor rebels to its government.  The government, consequently, had no right to treat them as such, and the talk about punishing traitors and rendering treason odious was out of place.  The people of the United States held or avowed no principle on which the Southern Confederacy could be condemned for treason, as we showed in our "American Republic," written in 1864-5, and published in 1866.  We had, for reasons already assigned, the legal right to suppress the Confederacy by force of arms, but, considering the theories prevalent with the American people, we had no moral right, at least, to inflict on any of the confederates, not even on their leader, the pains and penalties of treason.  The government, if it resolved to restore them to their normal relations in the Union, instead of holding them as territories under military governors, was morally bound to restore them without disfranchising or disabling any class of their citizens.  On the ground we take, the secessionists, when they made war on the Union, as they did when the attacked Fort Sumter, were traitors and rebels; but there was no ground assumed during the war, or even since assumed either by the president and his cabinet, or by congress, on which they were either.  So far as the principles of government distinctly held by the American people were concerned, the war was not a civil, but a foreign war, and on our part a purely defensive war.  When peace was obtained, the government had unquestionably the right to exact indemnity for the past and security for the future.  But it had no right to punish any confederate as traitor or rebel, or to impose on him any disability as such.  It could not do it when the confederates submitted to the Union, were ready to obey its constitutional authority and laws, and whom it recognized as an integral portion of the American people, without biting its own nose off.

The government, in dealing with the Southern States since the war was closed by the surrender of the last confederate force in the field, seems never to have reflected that they were no longer to be treated as enemies, but as an integral portion of the American people; and that whatever tended to retartd their reorganization, to weaken or distract their respective governments, or to prevent or to impair their industrial, commercial, or agricultural prosperity, tended to the grave detriment of the other States, whose fortunes henceforth were bound up with theirs.  We hold the general government, both congress and the executive, responsible for the horrible misgovernment of South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, of every one of the Southern States, where, aided by federal troops, the government fell into the hands of Northern adventurers, scalawags, and negroes; and we count the injury done to them an injury done to the whole Union, from which the whole Union, the North not less than the South, is now suffering.  One member of the body cannot suffer without the whole body suffering with it.  The whole evil might easily have been avoided by restoring the State governments to the real people of the South under their natural leaders, and by leaving them to manage their internal affairs, and to repair the damages of the war in their own way.  All the trouble has come from disabling the Southern leaders, and the determination to use the freedmen to keep the republican party in power, and through it to make the general government the supreme and only government of the land.

There was no danger that one of the former slave States would, if left to themselves, to the management of their own affairs, have attempted to reestablish slavery.  They were generally glad that slavery was abolished.  They would have treated the slave as a freeman, but they would not have given him political equality.  The hostility of the South, since the war, has never been to the freedom of the slave, but to making him, ignorant and sordid as he for the most part is, the political equal of the white man, and, where his race is in the majority, the master of the government.  The effort of congress and of the administration to force negro suffrage and eligibility on the country, especially in those sections where the colored poulation largely outnumber the white people, was a blunder, offensive to the whites, and injurious to the blacks.  On this question we separated from our friend Senator Sumner, for we considered the policy little short of madness, and experience has, in no respect, tended to justify it.  But, having been adopted, or forced upon the country by republican spite and republican love of place, it must be submitted to as an evil that cannot be remedied.  Yet, as the disabilities of the leading white men are removed, and as the States are left to manage their own affairs without federal interference, the real Southern people will gradually lessen the evil, or render negro suffrage and eligibility comparatively harmless.  The negro is a good servant, but a bad master.  He is not fit to govern, and he cannot bear equality; but he will gradually find his level, and, giving up the preacher-demagogues of his own race, will follow the advice and direction of intelligent whites, who will prove that they are his true friends, and have his real welfare at heart.

The republican party find that, even by the aid of the freedmen and federal troops, they cannot continue to govern the country; and it is time for the government to learn that the country will not have the public interests sacrificed to the effort to force negro equality, far less negro supremacy and misrule, and that its true policy is to leave the negro to himself, and to the protection, as other citizens, of the State governments.  In that way only can he cease to be a disturbing element in our politics.

But the government has blundered no less on the question of finance.  There may be men in the country who are respectable bankers and private financiers, but there was not a man connected with the administration, in either house of congress, that understood the science of public finance, or how to turn the credit of the government to the best possible account.  Mr. Bowen, in his "American Political Economy," asserts, and appears to us to prove, that during the war the people paid in the shape of taxes, if they had been equally distibuted throughout the four years for which the war lasted, enough to have met all the necessary expenses of the war, so as to have left as its conclusion not a cent of public debt.  Yet the public debt incurred by the wars was, at its conclusion, at least three thousand millions of dollars, and the larger part of it, in spite of Treasury reports, remains as yet unliquidated, and a most crippling burden on the industry of the country, especially when coupled with the extravagance and constatnly increasing expenditures of the government itself.  Mr. Lincoln and his Secretary of State never understood any thing of public economy, and appeared to act on the principle that men were to be induced to support the war policy of the government by finding it making them millionaires.  The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Chase, was an honest, well-meaning man, but the energies of his mind had been employed chiefly in the agitation of the slave question, in organizing a political combination for the overthrow of slavery, and in dreams of an impracticable equality.  He knew comparatively little of finance, and sought instruction of Jay Cooke and others, who knew still less and had far less honesty and integrity than he, as their support of the fallacy, that "a national debt is a national blessing," and their subsequent disastrous failures in their own private business operations, amply proved.  These bankers were in the habit of treating debt as capital, and trading on it as such, and consequently, in their estimation, the larger the national debt, the larger the national capital, and the larger the business and profits of-the brokers.

The secretary's first financial operation was a blunder; we might say, a financial suicide.  His first loan was taken by the banks, and he drew from them all, or nearly all, their specie, and thus forced them throughout the country to suspend payment.  He might have avoided this disaster by leaving the money in the banks, and paying its principle creditors in bank certificates, which would to a great extent have circulated as currency, and the smaller creditors in drafts on the banks in which the loan was deposited.  As the banks were solvent and paid specie when demanded, both the notes and certificates woud have circulated at par, and very few would have been presented for redemption in coin, not more in proportion than in ordinary times, for the holders would have been in general satisfied to receive either a transfer of credit, or the bills of the bank.  There need have been no extraordinary demand for gold and silver coin, not greater than the banks could meet without crippling themselves.  In this way the necessity of the suspension of the banks might have been avoided, and the currency kept at par.  If it was thought that the subtreasury act, which requires the receips and disbursements of the government to be made in gold and silver coin, stood in the way of this arrangement, which we think it did not, nothing would have been easier than to have obtained an act of congress suspending its operations, in this respect, during the war.  The policy of the government should have been to strengthen the currency and keep it at par with gold, in order to keep down the prices of what it had to purchase: and this, with a little foresight, it might easily have done, and thus have maintained an equilibrium between its war expenditures and the war taxes it levied on the people.  But, instead of this, it began by taking from the banks their reserve of gold, and compelling them to suspend, and forcing the business operations of the country and its own to be carried on in an irredeemable and constantly depreciating paper currency.

The exhaustion of the banks of their specie reserve and the bank suspensions left the country without any currency or money in which it could receive loans when negotiated.  This, we suppose, led to the issuing of treasury notes, and making them a legal tender for all dues except the customs, which were still to be paid in gold.  We will not say that the act of congress, authorizing the issue of these treasury notes as a national paper currency, was not a necessity at the time it was passed, for we are not sufficiently well informed on the subject to decide so important a question; but this much we may say, if it was a necessity, it was the previous blundering of the treasury department in having exhausted, unnecessarily, the banks of their gold, that made it so.  It has been said that the secretary himself disapproved of the desperate measure; but our memory is strangely at fault, if he did not urge it upon congress and talk a large amount of nonsense about demonetizing gold and silver, as if that were possible while they constituted the currency of all civilized nations, unless we ceased to have any commercial relations with them, and while we made the duties on imports and the interest on government bonds payable in coin.  They could be demonetized and made simple merchandize, only on condition that the government dispensed entirely with their use as money, and made the treasury notes a legal tender for all debts due to it and from one citizen or denizen to another, which the act did not do.  It simply created a double currency: the one of gold and silver for certain purposes; and the other of treasury notes, resting on the credit of the government, for other purposes.

The bill creating the so-called legal tenders was in the nature of a forced loan, without interest and irredeemable.  It was an act of downright public robbery, especially since the notes were not receivable for all dues to the government, but only for a certain portion of them.  The original bill, we believe, contained a prevision that after a certain time the notes might be converted into interest-bearing bonds payable in gold; but that provision was soon struck out, and the government need never redeem them unless it chooses.  The measure seemed to supply the government with ample funds.  Loans, to any amount desired, could easily enough be obtained at siex per cent, or from the people at seven three-tenths.  The financial operations of the government were considered a grand success, and its expenditures were equally great.  But what need of loans at interest at all?  Why not have paid out directly the greenbacks, and saved the interest on its bonds, and the obligation to pay the bonds in gold, since the loans were received not in gold, but in greenbacks or legal tenders; that is, in currency, supplied by the treasury itself?  The interest and bonds payable in gold, declared to be demonetized, were quite unnecessary, for the notes were worth as much in the treasury when received from the printer, as when borrowed from the people, the banks, or the brokers.

But, as gold was not demonetized, it remained the standard, and the greenbacks were worth only the amount of gold dollars they could purchase.  They were not and could not be retained at par.  We spoke of the premium on gold, but it was not that gold was at a premium, but that the greenbacks were at a discount.  Gold did not appreciate, but the currency depreciated, and at one time to two hundred and eighty-five per cent, if we do not mistake.  The government received in some of its loans only forty cents on the dollar, and, if we are rightly informed, only sixty cents on an average of all its loans, for which it bound itself to pay one hundred cents in gold, that is, nearly twice the amount received, besides interest.  Is it possible to imagine a more miserbale financial policy, one more destructive to the interests of a country?  The depreciation of the currency had the appearance of raising the price of all goods, agricultural and industrial products, and the wages of labor; but it was all an illusion, for the country was only contracting a debt, if you count the several state debts, municipal debts, and corporation debts, to say nothing of individual indebtedness to more than one-half of the whole assessed value of the United States before the war, excluding the property invested in slaves.  In 1866 the taxes collected by the general government alone were, if we can trust statistics, within one hundred and forty millions of the whole income for that year of the entire Union.  Several millions of taxes of one sort or another have been remitted, but still the business of the country is depressed, and men and institutions supposed to abound in wealth are every day failing, and proving that our business prosperity was built on debt, called, by way of euphony, credit, not capital.

The journals attribute the depression of business to the want of confidence, which shows that, in their estimation, business is transacted on credit, that is, debt, not on capital; and hence, when there comes a crash in the business world, and house after house doing an immense trade goes down, they term it a panic.  But no restoration of confidence possible will revive business, and gives us what are called flush times.  The fact is, the mercantile system, introduced by England, or the credit system, that is, the system of making debt pass for capital, is itself failing, in consequence of its own expansion.  The principle of the system, as we understand it, is to do business on credit, and to rely on the profits of the business done to pay the interest on the borrowed capital, and to discharge in time the loan itself.  This would, perhaps, be well enough, if the capital borrowed were real capital, for the volume of business would then not exceed the ability of the country to sustain, and no general depression of business could occur.  But it is credit, not capital, that is borrowed.  The banks do not lend money, they simply lend their credit, and consequently depend on their debtors for the means to sustain their own credit, or to redeem their bills; and these depend on the amount and profits of the business they do on their borrowed credit.  If they fail the bank fails, or suspends, as it is politely called.  The greater the facility of borrowing credit, the greater the extension of business.  The multiplication of banks of discount facilitates the borrowing of credit, tempts an undue proportion of the young men of the country into business, and those already engaged, to extend their business operations, till business is expanded far beyond the wants of the community, or the ability of the industry and productions of the soil to support; and a collapse and business depression, as well as widespread financial ruin, inevitably follow.  No wisdom, foresight, or prudence, no business tact or capacity, can save a house that has borrowed, or given credit, from failing, for it will be carried down by the collapse of credit, or the demand for payment of the debt hitherto used as capital; and the means to pay it will not be forthcoming, when business has been overdone.

Business men feel the pressure, and, with us, demand of the government more currency or more banks to facilitate credit.  Fatal delusion!  The difficulty is not the lack of currency, nor of institutions of credit, but that people have nothing to part with to sustain credit.  We presume the business of the country, trade, manufactures, and internal improvements, is even now in excess of its actual ability, and consequently things must be worse before they can be better.  All nations that turn their energies in the various channels of business, or make business their leading interest, and push it beyond the ability of labor and the soil to sustain, must be constantly experiencing what we have been experiencing since September, 1873.  In reality, the depression complained of is only an effort of nature, so to speak, to expel a disease, that, if not expelled, must prove fatal.  It is the result of the operation of the vis medicatrix of nature, and, however painful it may be, it will bring with it a cure, unless we immediately rush, as we are not unlikely to do, on the firest symptoms of returning health, into another business debauch.

What remedy the government can apply, we are neither statesman nor financier enough to say, but we do not believe there is any effectual remedy possible, short of breaking up entirely the system that treats debt as capital; for, in the long run, the interest that must be paid on the borrowed credit used as captial, will more than absorb the average net profits of the business that can be done with it.  Individuals may succeed, and enormous estates be accumulated, but the business classes as a body will fail, and end poorer than they began.  The nation will be only impoverished and weakened.  Government may aggravate the evil, but we see little it can do to mitigate it.  Neither resumption of specie payments, nor inflation of the currency, will cure it, or permanently lessen it.  We are an old man, but we cannot remember a time when we did not hear a loud demand for more currency; and even when the banks professed to redeem their bills in coin, the same periodical panics occurred, or seasons of business depression and hard times that have occurred under our present irredeemable paper-money, only more frequently.  We remember 1819, 1829, 1836-7, 1849, 1857, which were disastrous as 1873, or as in 1875.  We know no way of preventing these periodical panics, if you choose to call them so, with a mixed currency of gold and paper, or with banks of discount authorized to pay out of their own notes as money, that is, to lend their credit, instead of their capital.

Our studies of finance and political economy were made many years ago, say from 1829 to 1843, and we are too old to revise the views we then formed.  We then became a "hard-money" man, and opposed to all banks, except banks of exchange, deposit, and transfer of credit.  Such a policy may be objected to as likely, if it is adopted, to largely diminish the volume of business, and to keep idle the little savings of the people; but that is precisely the result we would bring about.  We grant our views are old-fashioned, and directly opposed to those of the modern business world, to the spirit of enterprise so now loudly boasted; but we are not so silly as to suppose that any community will adopt them, and so we forbear to urge them.  Yet we would restrict the volume of business, the trade and enterprise of the community, to its real capital, and instead of facilitating the entrance of young men without capital into business, we would send them to cultivate the soil, employ them in agriculture or the mechanic arts; and that, not for purposes of exchange, or the acquisition of wealth, but to gain an honest living by the sweat of their face.  This is the normal condition of man on earth, and every departure from it is attendend with more or less evil to body or soul, or to both.  Yet by our age of material progress and "advanced ideas" this can be regarded only as very absurd, and as betraying complete ignorance of the world we live in.

The financial question is, perhaps, the leading question at present in our home politics.  As a "hard-money" man, we are in favor of the policy of resumption, and utterly opposed to inflation.  Resumption will stop gambling in gold, and prevent to some extent artificial fluctuations in the price of gold, so prejudicial to our mercantile community; but it will  neither revive business, nor give a real specie currency.  The banks may profess to redeem their notes in coin, and they may do so when there is no great demand for specie; but when there is anything like a general call for it, most of them will suspend, and we should have only a paper currency.  Of course the change to a specie basis would fall hard upon debtors, and creditors would gain some advantage, yet we do not see how it could affect the value of government bonds, for nearly all these, and the interest on them, are payable now in gold.  Resumption, it seems to us, might take place with hardly any increased demand for gold either on the banks or the treasury, would be satisfied with, and even prefer, bank notes or treasury notes, if really redeemable in coin on demand.  Only the small amount of gold needed for adjusting foreign balances would be required.

The measure which we dislike the most of any that we have heard suggested, is, to suppress the national banks, and to make the currency consist entirely of treasury notes, or legal tenders, resting entirely on the credit of the government.  This would give the government the power to expand or contract the currency at will, and to change at any moment the measure of values; besides making the currency consist of that worst of all financial evils,-an irredeemable paper currency, which no possible contrivance can keep at par with coin.  Parties would be formed for expanding or contracting the currency; money, as a measure of values, would vary as the one party or the other succeeded in the elections, and business would be brought to a stand-still, for business men would never know on what to depend, since the policy of the government to-day may be reversed to-mor-row.  Besides, if we are to have banks issuing their notes to circulate as money-and have them in some shape we shall, at least for a long time to come-we are disposed to believe that no better or safer system can be devised than the existing national-bank system.  Compel the national banks to redeem their notes on demand in specie, and they would furnish as uniform, safe, stable, and steady a paper currency, as is possible.  As banks of issue and circulation, they would be absolutely safe.  Their defect is in not affording due protection to depositors, which it is impossible for any system of banks, managed by imperfect men, to afford amidst the constant fluctuations of business, if the bank is allowed to make its deposits a basis of its discounts.  The objection, that the national banks, banking on government bonds, receive a double profit on the bonds they hold, or which are deposited in the treasury as security to their bill-holders, first, in the interest on them, and, second, in the profits arising from using them as bank capital, would be in a measure obviated by resumption and the necessity of having coin reserves.  The objection is equally vaild against the whole modern system, which treats paper evidences of debt as capital.  As long as we retain the system, it is not worth while to insist on so trite an objection.  It is part and parcel of the system by which "the rich are made richer, and the poor poorer," especially favored by all popular governments, or so-called free governments.

Though we favor the early resumption of specie payments, and understand no reason why it may not take place on January 1, 1876, as well as January 1, 1879, we do not attach supreme importance to the question; for we do not believe that resumption will give us a really sound and stable currency, a thing we have never had since we could remember; or that, if business once revives, over-trading or the undue expansion of credit, or, what is the same thing, debt will not soon cause the recurrence of similar evils from which the country is now suffering, though slowly recovering, we would fain hope.  In our view the modern commercial system, which we call the English system, is fundamentally wrong, and tends, while it enriches individuals, like your Vanderbilts, Stewarts, Astors, etc., to impoverish the nation.  France, in which the system, in spite of the efforts of Napoleon, has by no means been carried so far as with us, has shown, since the disastrous war with Prussia, a financial ability, pecuniary resources, and a recuperative energy, which we, boasting that we have the best government in the world, look in vain for in our own country.  We probably have not recuperated at all since the close of our civil war: at any rate we are only slowly working off the effects of our recent debauch, and recovering from the delirium tremens which followed it.

We see little in the outlook of our home politics to encourage us for the future.  The evils are great, and it requires wiser heads than ours to suggest and apply a remedy; that is, a remedy that will be adopted.  The moral constitution of the American people is so shattered and impaired, that they cannot stand the necessary remedies.  There can be no question of the moral and political corruption of the republican party, but, unhappily, the opposing, or the democratic party, is hardly less corrupt.  It was demoralized by the loss of its Southern wing, and by the course it took during the civil war.  The brains of the party were always at the South, and the South is not yet recovered from the collapse of the Confederacy; and the party is now without competent leaders, and without a well-defined national policy.  It has, no doubt, many able men in its ranks, as Bayard of Delaware, Thurman and Pendleton of Ohio, Hendricks of Indiana, Seymour, Wood, and Tilden, of New York, Randal and Buckalew of Pennsylvania, but no one capable of shaping its policy, and giving unity to its councils and action.  It has not recovered from its demoralization, and is not a compact and well-organized party, or more honest, more public-spirited, or less greedy of the spoils than the republican party.  We can see only one thing to be gained by its accession to power.  It would, most likely, leave the negro to take care of himself, and discontinue federal interference in the internal affairs of the Southern States, and with State elections.  It would probably do away with the machinery constructed by the lamented Lincoln, by which a president, if he chooses, can always reelect himself, as President Lincoln did, in 1864.  This would be much, and is sufficient to make us desire ardently the success of the party in 1876.  But of that success we are not sanguine.  General Grant is a hard man to defeat; and, if the republicans run him for a third term, they are pretty sure to elect him.  There is no constitutional, legal, or moral objection to a third term, and for ourselves we wish it were constitutional to choose a president for life.  We have a horror of the doctrine, introduced by the democratic , or Jackson party, of rotation in office.

If the democratic party had any other policy than that of turning out the republicans and taking their place, they might easily succeed in the next presidential election, for we think that there can be no question that at this moment there is a widespread distrust of the administration party; but it acts like one of those parties that seem doomed to defeat, and our own belief is that General Grant will be reelected for a third term: he certainly will be, if he chooses to run.  The American people believe him to be a great general, not simply a great butcher.  His capture of Vicksburg, and relief of Chattanooga, after the failure of Rosecrans at Chickamauga, certainly were creditable to him as a general; but his march from the Rapidan to City Point at the sacrifice of 90,000 men, as brave troops as ever met an enemy, is saved from disgrace to the commander, only by its final success.  Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and that condoned what otherwise would have been regarded as the most discreditable campaign of the war.  Yet, his military glory is dear to the American people.  Besides, he is a Western man, with Western manners and tastes, and the West is the governing section of the Union.  Let no democrat fancy that he lacks popularity or can be easily defeated, if a candidate.  He is a fair representative of the degenerate American people.  His easy indifference to the duties of his office, his indolence, and not too rigid morality, make him, personally, a favorite with the mass of our countrymen.  He is not too refined, not too far above them, nor too strait-laced to please them.

We are told that Governor Tilden aspires through the democratic party to the presidency; but, if so, he shows no little lack of wisdom.  Governor Tilden is, we are told, for we do not know him personally, a gentleman in his tastes, manners, and feelings; and to suppose that a gentleman, with the manners and feelings of a gentleman, can be elected President of the United States, seems to us ridiculous.  Besides, Governor Tilden is an Eastern man, and none but a Western candidate can hope to be successful.  He is, we believe, an honest man, and a ring-breaker: who among politicians wants such a man for president?-"The politicians will not support me for president," said John C. Calhoun to us in 1841, "for they know I would hold all office-holders to a rigid responsibility, and give them no chance to defraud the government: and this is precisely what they do not want."-The politicians, and, we fear, the people, do not want an honest man or gentleman for president.  In this respect, since the defection and demoralization of the South, we do not imagine the democrats differ essentiall from the republicans.  The one, we presume, is as ready to accept a fat job as the other.  The large Catholic population of the country, very generally attached to the democratic party, ought to have a salutary moral influence on that party; but, so far as we have observed, political Catholics are not a whit better, more honest, or more devoted to principle, than non-Catholics.  An intelligent Catholic friend, born and bred in Ireland, says they are less so, and that they have contributed their full share to the corruption of parties.  We regret that not a few among them have not only no sound political knowledge, but have never been instructed in the first principles of morals, to say nothing of religion.  These add, to the political corruptionthey brought with them from the Old World, the deeper corruption acquired from our own demagogues.  We are sorry to say such things, and would not, if the persons in question had any modesty, and did not claim for themselves, at least if their journals did not claim for them, every virtue under heaven.  They may cry out Know-nothing against us till their throats are sore, for what we care: we now the truth of what we say.

We have relied, and still rely, on our Catholic population to introduce an element of honesty and integrity into our politics; but not a few of them, instead of drawing their inspiration from their religion, and taking its principles for their guide, draw it from the false theories of the country, and follow the most unscrupulous demagogues the country can supply.  In order to refute the baseless charge that their Church is unfavorable to free government, they defend extreme democratic views, and in all, except religion, profess an unlimited devotion to the popular will, that is to say, to the will of the demagogues, or the dictates of their party.  We do not find that they are more honest or conscientious, or less swayed by private and personal interest, than Protestants or infidels.  To a certain extent they are the least reasoning, the noisiest, and the most unscrupulous class of American citizens, as well as the most exacting and the most difficult to satisfy.  Their violent partisanship and greediness for place are anything but edifying.  They seem, the moment they engage in politics, to forget that they are Catholics, and to scout the upright and moral conduct enjoined by the Church upon all her children, whatever the sphere in which they are called to act.  Besides, such is their overweening self-conceit, and such is their sensitiveness, that they will bear no reproof, and lilsten to no advice, not even from their clergy.  Do these Catholics never reflect on the duty they owe as citizens to the land of their birth or adoption?  Do they never reflect on the immense responsibility that rests upon them as Catholics?  Does it never occur to them that only the Catholic Church can save the country, and that she can do it only on condition that her children imbibe her spirit, and practise the morality she enjoins?  Do they ever, in the field of politics, think of anything but to cry up the man that pleases them, and to cry down the man that offends them?

We speak not of all Catholics, but of political Catholics only.  We would fain hope that the majority of the Catholic body in this country do not answer to our description, or justify the wretched pun on patriot, that of Pat-riot.  Nobody knows better than we do, the high moral worth, the sterling honesty, of the great body of our Catholic population; but these are no noisy politicians, no office-seekers, and are rarely office-holders.  If they vote at elections, it is quietly, honestly, conscientiously, with an eye single to the public good, not with a sinister eye to their own private interest.  These may sometimes be, and not seldom are, overborne or misled by their unscrupulous brethren, who make a trade of politics, are always ready to traffic in votes, and look to office, with its "pickings and stealings," for the means of living; but gradually they recover their independence, separate themselvesfrom the predatory class, as the sedentary Germans did from their nomadic brethren hovering always on their outskirts; and, while subordinating all their actions to the honor and glory of the Incarnate Word, they carry the spirit and principles of their religion into their political action, as they do into all the transactions of life.  It is one these, whatever their race or original nationality, Irish, French, or German, we place our dependence for the ultimate safety of the republic; for through these the Church can exert her salutary influence, infuse a recuperative energy into the nation, and enable us as a people to recover from the moral prostration from which we are now suffering.

If Catholics would take the pains to make themselves sufficiently acquainted with the science of government to perform intelligently their duties as American citizens, and perform them with honesty and fidelty, they could soon infuse a nobler spirit into the democratic party, and make its accession to power a national benefit.  But, to do this, they must labor to raise the moral standard of the party instead of lowering themselves to its level, and slavishly following it in its crude opinions, formed without thought or intelligence of the nature or purposes of government.  They might do so, and we hope they will in time, though, we fear, not till it is too late to save the republic, which without them is lost.  No republic can stand without religion, and they have all the religion, properly so called, there is in the country.  Let them study to understand and perform the duties, as well as to understand and claim the rights, of American citizens, and all may yet go well.