cold, white and useless--leaning upon his broken staff; while
timorous leadership gaped at his still majesty--

"Awed by the face, and the fear, and the fame
Of the dead king standing there;
For his beard was so white and his eyes so cold,
They left him alone with his crown of gold!"

Had the Government bought--as was urged upon it in the fall of '61--all
the cotton in the country, at the then prices, and paid for it in
Confederate bonds at six per cent., that cotton--according to
calculations of the best cotton men of the South--would have produced
in Liverpool, during the next three years, at rapidly-increasing prices,
_over one thousand millions of dollars in gold!_ Granting this erroneous,
even by one-half, it follows that the immense specie balance thus held,
would--after paying all accruing interest--have left such a surplus as
to have kept the currency issue of Confederate States' notes merely
nominal, and even then have held them at a par valuation.

The soldier, who freely bared his breast to the shock of a hundred
battles for his country, his fireside and his little ones, could then
have sent his pittance of eleven dollars a month to that fireside, with
the consciousness it might buy those dear ones bread at least. But long
before the darkest days fell upon the South, his whole month's pay
would not buy them _one pound of bacon_!

Secretary Memminger would seem to have had some theory, or reasons of
his own, for refusing to listen to the plain common sense in these
suggestions from practical sources. With a strictly agricultural
population to supply, he insisted on the issue of Confederate notes in
such volume that the supply far exceeded the demand. For, had there
been a large manufacturing population actively employed in the South,
as there was in the North, the inflation of currency might have been
temporarily concealed by its rapid passage from hand to hand. But with
no such demand--with only the daily necessities of the household and of
the person to relieve--the plethora of these promises to pay naturally
resulted, first in sluggishness, then in a complete break-down of the
whole system.

Still, from the joyous days of Montgomery, and the triumphant ones
after Manassas--through the doubtful pauses of the next winter and the
dark days of New Orleans--on to the very _Dies irae_--there pervaded
government and people a secure belief that the finances of the North
would break down, a