for movin';
For, 'fore you lick us, it 'll be the long'st day ever you see.
Yourn, (ez I 'xpec' to be nex' spring,)

B., MARKISS O' BIG BOOSY.

[Footnote A: A rustic euphemism for the American variety of the
_Mephitis_.--H.W.]

* * * * *

TAXATION.

Milton, in his superb sonnet to Sir Henry Vane the Younger, declares
that Rome, in the most prosperous age of the Republic, never possessed a
better senator,--

"Whether to settle peace, or to unfold
The hollow drift of States, hard to be spelled;
Then to advise how war may, best upheld,
Move by _her two main nerves, iron and gold,_
In all her equipage."

The list of his writings appended by Mr. Upham to his instructive
biography of our _quondam_ fellow-citizen and governor[A] does not
enable us to judge to which of his twenty-five works Milton particularly
refers, in this magnificent commendation of Sir Henry Vane's financial
skill. It might be inferred, however, from the significant union of iron
and gold, as the "main nerves" of war, that he understood the importance
of a specie currency, which in fact, in those days, was the only
currency known.

[Footnote A: Sir Henry Vane the Younger, being then twenty-three
years of age, arrived in Boston in 1635, was chosen governor of
the Colony in 1636, and returned to England the next year. His
house stood, within the recollection of the writer, on what is
now Tremont Street, on a spot opposite the Museum.]

Our business, however, at present, is not with currency, but with taxes,
which as long ago as Cicero's time were pronounced "the nerves of the
State," and which, whether paid in gold or in what can in the present
condition of the country be best substituted, must be allowed to be the
great sympathetic nerve of the body-politic. Introduce a wise and
efficient system of taxation, and life and energy will pervade the
country. Without such a system it will soon sink into a general and
fatal paralysis.

The country is engaged at this moment in a struggle of unexampled
magnitude. The great wars of the last generation in Europe gathered no
army equal in magnitude to that which the Government of the United
States has, within little more than six months, called into being. Its
naval operations, so far as concerns the extent of sea-coast effectively
blockaded, and considering the condition of that br