th should not live more harmoniously together in the future than
in the past, now that the one rock of offence has been blasted out of
the way. We do not believe that the war has tended to lessen their
respect for each other, or that it has left scars which will take to
aching again with every change of the political weather. We must bind
the recovered communities to us with hooks of interest, by convincing
them that we desire their prosperity as an integral part of our own.
For a long while yet there will be a latent disaffection, even when the
outward show may be fair, as in spring the ground often stiffens when
the thermometer is above the freezing point. But we believe, in spite
of this, that all this untowardness will yield to the gradual wooing of
circumstances, and that it is to May, and not December, that we are to
look forward. Even in our finances, which are confessedly our weakest
point, we doubt if the experience of any other nation will enable us to
form a true conception of our future. We shall have, beyond question,
the ordinary collapse of speculation that follows a sudden expansion of
paper currency. We shall have that shivering and expectant period when
the sails flap and the ship trembles ere it takes the wind on the new
tack. But it is no idle boast to say that there never was a country
with such resources as ours. In Europe the question about a man always
is, What _is_ he? Here it is as invariably, What does he _do_? And in
that little difference lies the security of our national debt for
whoever has eyes. In America there is no idle class supported at the
expense of the nation, there is no splendid poor-house of rank or
office, but every man is at work adding his share to the wealth, and to
that extent insuring the solvency, of the country. Our farm, indeed, is
mortgaged, but it is a mortgage which the yearly profits will pay off.

Those who look upon the war as a wicked crusade of the North against
the divinely sanctioned institutions of the South, and those who hope
even yet to reknit the monstrous league between slavery and a party
calling itself Democratic, will of course be willing to take back the
seceding States without conditions. Neither of these classes is any
longer formidable, either by its numbers or the character of its
leaders. But there is yet a third class, who seem to have confused
their minds with some fancied distinction between civil and foreign
war. Holding the States to be ind