hen
prudent sagacity could have been of little aid: the "Five-and-Twenty"
Loan was certainly eminently successful, and the tough, broad back of
Yankee-land will bear more burdens yet before it breaks or bends. I am
speaking now solely of the resources which can be made available for
_carrying on_ the war: these, I think, will be found sufficient for its
probable duration. With the commercial future or national credit of the
Northern States this question has nothing to do; it is not difficult to
foresee how both must inevitably be compromised by the load of debt
which swells portentously with every hour of warfaring. But if we have
been wont to undervalue the strength of Federaldom, latent and
displayed, we have perhaps scarcely realized how very unsubstantial and
slippery are its presumed points of vantage.

First, take the North great battle or, rather,
stalking-horse--Abolition.

Let no reader be here unnecessarily alarmed. On that terrible slave
question, over which wiser brains have puzzled, till they became lost in
a labyrinth of self-contradiction, I purpose to speak only a few cursory
words. It is beyond dispute that a vast extent of the richest land in
the South can only be kept in cultivation by the Africans, who can
thrive and fatten where the white man withers helplessly. No one that
has realized the present state of our own West Indian colonies, will
believe that the enfranchised negro can be depended upon as a daily
laborer for hire. The listless indolence inherent in all tropical races
_will_ assert itself, as soon as free agency begins or is restored. With
a bright sun overhead, and a sufficiency of sustenance for the day
before him, money will not tempt Sambo to toil among cotton or canes,
should the spirit move him to lie under his own vine or fig-tree; and he
is unfortunately peculiarly liable to these lazy fits just when his
services are most vitally important to the interests of his employer.
From so much ground having been thrown out of cultivation in the West
Indies, the supply of free negro labor is perhaps now nearly equal to
the ordinary demand; but we all know how, in the early times of
emancipation, the fortunes of our planters fared. There has been, in all
ages, certain cases of apparent political necessity, hardly to be
justified--sometimes hardly to be defended--on purely moral grounds.
Whether the existence and maintenance of a slave population in the South
be one of these huge dilemmas