t upon Truth, and the heaven blesseth
it; ill works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous
thing."

E PLURIBUS UNUM

1861

We do not believe that any government--no, not the Rump Parliament on
its last legs--ever showed such pitiful inadequacy as our own during
the past two months. Helpless beyond measure in all the duties of
practical statesmanship, its members or their dependants have given
proof of remarkable energy in the single department of peculation; and
there, not content with the slow methods of the old-fashioned
defaulter, who helped himself only to what there was, they have
contrived to steal what there was going to be, and have peculated in
advance by a kind of official post-obit. So thoroughly has the credit
of the most solvent nation in the world been shaken, that an
administration which still talks of paying a hundred millions for Cuba
is unable to raise a loan of five millions for the current expenses of
government. Nor is this the worst: the moral bankruptcy at Washington
is more complete and disastrous than the financial, and for the first
time in our history the Executive is suspected of complicity in a
treasonable plot against the very life of the nation.

Our material prosperity for nearly half a century has been so
unparalleled that the minds of men have become gradually more and more
absorbed in matters of personal concern; and our institutions have
practically worked so well and so easily that we have learned to trust
in our luck, and to take the permanence of our government for granted.
The country has been divided on questions of temporary policy, and the
people have been drilled to a wonderful discipline in the manoeuvres
of party tactics; but no crisis has arisen to force upon them a
consideration of the fundamental principles of our system, or to arouse
in them a sense of national unity, and make them feel that patriotism
was anything more than a pleasant sentiment,--half Fourth of July and
half Eighth of January,--a feeble reminiscence, rather than a living
fact with a direct bearing on the national well-being. We have had long
experience of that unmemorable felicity which consists in having no
history, so far as history is made up of battles, revolutions, and
changes of dynasty; but the present generation has never been called
upon to learn that deepest lesson of polities which is taught by a
common danger, throwing the people back on their national instincts,