To carry out the President's plan, and to give us once more working State governments in the States which have rebelled,—to give them, indeed, the first true republican governments they have ever known,—would require for Virginia about 12,000 voters. They can be counted, we suppose, at this moment, in the counties under our military control. Indeed, the loyal State government of Virginia is at this moment organized. In North Carolina it would require 9,500 voters. The loyal North Carolina regiments are an evidence that that number of home-grown men will readily appear. In South Carolina, to give a generous estimate, we need 5,000 voters. It is the only State which we never heard my man wish to emigrate to. It is the hardest region, therefore, of any to redeem. At the worst, till the 5,000 appear, the new Georgia will be glad to govern all the country south of the Santee, and the new North Carolina what is north thereof. Georgia will need 10,000 loyal voters. There are more than that number now encamped upon her soil, willing to stay there. Of Florida we have spoken. Alabama requires 9,000. They have been hiding away from conscription; they have been fleeing into Kentucky and Ohio: they will not be unwilling to reappear when the inevitable "first step" is taken. For Mississippi we want 7,000. Mr. Reverdy Johnson has told us where they are. For Louisiana, one tenth is 5,000. More than that number voted in the elections which returned the sitting members to Congress. For Texas, the proportion is 6,200; for Arkansas, 5,400. Those States are already giving account of themselves. In Tennessee the fraction required is 14,500. And as the people of Knoxville said, "They could do that in the mountains alone."
We have no suspicion of a want of latent Southern loyalty. But we have brought together these figures to show how inevitable is a reconstruction on the President's plan, even if Southern loyalty were as abject and timid as some men try to persuade us. These figures show us, that, if, of the million Northern men who have "prospected" the Southern country, in the march of victorious armies, only seventy-three thousand determine to take up their future lot there, and to establish there free institutions, they would be enough, without the help of one native, to establish these republican institutions in all the Rebel States. The deserted plantations, the farms offered for sale, almost for nothing, all the attractions of a softer climate, and all the just pride which makes the American fond of founding empires, are so many incentives to the undertaking of the great initiative proposed. In the cases of Virginia and Tennessee, and, as we suppose, of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, the beginning has already been made at home. In Florida a recent meeting at Fernandina gave promise for a like beginning. If it do not begin there, the Emigrant Aid Company must act at once to give the beginning.[52] There will remain the Carolinas and three of the Gulf States. The ploughing is not over there, and it is not time therefore to speak of the harvest. For the rest, we hope we have said enough to indicate to the ready and active men of the nation where their great present duty lies.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Principles of Political Economy, with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy. By JOHN STUART MILL. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
If works upon Political Economy, representing the orthodox European doctrine, are to be written, John Stuart Mill is certainly the man to write them. Able, candid, judicial, indefatigable, powerfully poised,—characterized by remarkable mental amplitude, by a rare steadiness of brain, by an admirable sense of logical relation, by a singular ease of command over his intellectual forces, by a clear and discriminating eye that does not wink when a hand is shaken before it,—of a humane and widely related nature, whose heats lie deep, so deep that many may think him cold,—of an understanding as dry as John Locke's, wanting imagination in all its degrees, from rhetorical imagination, which is the lowest, to epic imagination, which is the highest, and therefore destitute of the sovereign insights which go only with this faculty in its higher degrees, while, on the other hand, freed from the enticements and attractions that are inseparable from it,—Mr. Mill has qualifications unsurpassed, perhaps, by those of any man living for considerate and serviceable thinking upon matters of immediate practical interest and of a somewhat tangible nature. His mental structure exhibits combinations which are by no means frequent. Seldom is seen a conjunction of such cold purity of thinking with such generosity of nature; seldom such considerateness, such industry, patience, and carefulness of deliberation, with a boldness so entire; seldom such ducal self-possession and self-sufficingness, with equal openness to social and sympathetic impression; nor less rare, perhaps, is the union of a reflective power so large and dominating with an observation so active.
These mental qualities fit him in a peculiar degree for service in the field of Political Economy as now commonly defined,—a branch of literature which, more, perhaps, than any other, represents at once the genius and the limitation of our time.
Political Economy is a half-science, not total or integral; and if it pretend to spherical completeness, as it often does, it becomes open to grave accusation. The charges against it, considered as a strict and complete science, are two.
Of these the first has been cogently urged by Mr. Ruskin, while virtual admissions to a like effect were made by Mr. Buckle in his spirited account of Adam Smith. It is this: as a science, Political Economy must assume the perfect selfishness of every human being. Every science requires necessary, and therefore invariable, conditions, which, when expounded, are named laws. Such in Astronomy is gravitation, with the law of its diminution by distance; such in Chemistry is chemical attraction, with the law of definite proportions. The natural and perpetual condition assumed by Political Economy is the absolute supremacy in man of pecuniary interest. Absolute: it can admit no modification of this; it can make no room within its province for generosity, or for any action of man's soul, without forfeiting, so far, its claim to the character of a science. Put a dollar, with all honor, liberal justice, and humane attraction, on the one hand; put a dollar and one cent, with mere legal right and consequent safety, on the other hand; and Political Economy must assume that every man will gravitate to the latter by the same necessity which makes the balance incline toward the heavier weight. Or, conceding the contrary, it yields also its claim to the character of a perfect science, and takes rank among those half-sciences which partly expound necessary laws and partly contingent effects.
Now this assumed sovereignty of pecuniary interest seems to us not a final account of human beings. There is honor among thieves; is there none among merchants? Does not every man put some generous consideration for others into his business-transactions? Has an honorable publisher no aim but to print that which will sell best? Has he no regard to the character of his house? Has he no desire to furnish a nourishing pabulum and a healthful inspiration to the mind of his country? In the employment of labor and the giving of wages do men generally quite forget the workman, and think only of the work and its profit? This does not happen to accord with our observation of human nature. We think there is a large element of honorable human feeling incessantly playing into the economies of the world; and we think it might be yet larger without any injurious perturbation of these economies.