A LAW-GIVER NEEDED.
This country having fallen into the errors to which I have referred; into the hands of mediocre and incompetent legislators, without even a single statesman among them all; into the times of small minds and smaller measures that do not look beyond the day in which they are proposed; into industrial, financial and commercial ruin, with one half the wealth-producing power starving in idleness and no one seeming even to think what the end of this must be; having fallen into all these ills, this country needs that a giant mind shall spring into its councils, or else among its legislators, a captain which shall be able to grasp the helm of the ship of state now floundering hopelessly in the trough of the industrial sea, and put her before the wind again; a mind that shall have the wisdom and the courage to show the puerility of those who occupy the posts of honour, and, by the mere force of will, lift them into the right path; show them that beneath the surface of that which they seem to think is peaceable enough, there is a raging, seething volcano ready at the slightest occasion to burst forth and overwhelm everything in its path; a master mind which shall compel Congress by active measures to guide its powers rather than by inaction to provoke an eruption. This country needs that God shall send a law-giver; one who shall understand what has led to the present situation; what the exigencies of the people demand, and who shall have the ability to propose and the power to enforce the needed remedies—a Lycurgus to give a new code of laws that shall be the incarnation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which alone of all principles have any influence to mould the people, and from which they draw the characteristics which distinguish them from the other nations of the earth; and a Bonaparte to sweep out of the way the accumulating débris of years of vicious legislation and in its place inaugurate that code; needs a Lycurgus with his code of laws; a Bonaparte with his genius to command, and, combined with these, the vehement power of a Demosthenes to rouse the people to a sense of the danger in which they stand and, whether they will or not, lead them through a peaceable, rather than permit them to plunge into a bloody, revolution. Let this be done, no matter in what form this power may come, and a change of greater magnitude for good to this people than that proposed by Lycurgus for the Spartans, or that instituted in France by Bonaparte, will be inaugurated here.
But what has been done socially? Much of which I have not the time to speak, but this, as to what I would have for the social condition:—