The life-blood of the tyrant
Is ebbing fast away;
Victory waits at her opening gates,
And smiles on our array;
With solemn eyes the Centuries
Before us watching stand,
And Love lets down his starry crown
To bless the future land.
One more sublime endeavor,
And behold the dawn of Peace!
One more endeavor, and war forever
Throughout the land shall cease!
For ever and ever the vanquished power
Of Slavery shall be slain,
And Freedom's stained and trampled flower
Shall blossom white again!
Then rally! rally! rally!
Make tumult in the land!
Ye foresters, rally from mountain and valley!
Ye fishermen, from the strand!
Brave sons of the West, America's best!
New England's men of might!
From prairie and crag unfurl the flag,
And rally to the fight!
FINANCES OF THE REVOLUTION.
In all historical studies we should still bear in mind the difference between the point of view from which one looks at events and that from which they were seen by the actors themselves. We all act under the influence of ideas. Even those who speak of theories with contempt are none the less the unconscious disciples of some theory, none the less busied in working out some problems of the great theory of life. Much as they fancy themselves to differ from the speculative man, they differ from him only in contenting themselves with seeing the path as it lies at their feet, while he strives to embrace it all, starting-point and end, in one comprehensive view. And thus in looking back upon the past we are irresistibly led to arrange the events of history, as we arrange the facts of a science, in their appropriate classes and under their respective laws. And thus, too, these events give us the true measure of the intellectual and moral culture of the times, the extent to which just ideas prevailed therein upon all the duties and functions of private and public life. Tried by the standard of absolute truth and right, grievously would they all fall short,—and we, too, with them. Judged by the human standard of progressive development and gradual growth,—the only standard to which the man of the beam can venture, unrebuked, to bring the man with the mote,—we shall find much in them all to sadden us, and much, also, in which we can all sincerely rejoice.
In judging, therefore, the political acts of our ancestors, we have a right to bring them to the standard of the political science of their age, but we have no right to bring them to the higher standard of our own. Montesquieu could give them but an imperfect clue to the labyrinth in which they found themselves involved; and yet no one had seen farther into the mysteries of social and political organization than Montesquieu. Hume had scattered brilliant rays on dark places, and started ideas which, once at work in the mind, would never rest till they had evolved momentous truths and overthrown long-standing errors. But no one had yet seen, with Adam Smith, that labor was the original source of every form of wealth,—that the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer, were all equally the instruments of national prosperity,—or demonstrated as unanswerably as he did that nations grow rich and powerful by giving as they receive, and that the good of one is the good of all. The world had not yet seen that fierce conflict between antagonistic principles which she was soon to see in the French Revolution; nor had political science yet recorded those daring experiments in remoulding society, those constitutions framed in closets, discussed in clubs, accepted and overthrown with equal demonstrations of popular zeal, and which, expressing in their terrible energy the universal dissatisfaction with past and present, the universal grasping at a brighter future, have met and answered so many grave questions,—questions neither propounded nor solved in any of the two hundred constitutions which Aristotle studied in order to prepare himself for the composition of his "Politics." The world had not yet seen a powerful nation tottering on the brink of anarchy, with all the elements of prosperity in her bosom,—nor a bankrupt state sustaining a war that demanded annual millions, and growing daily in wealth and power,—nor the economical phenomena which followed the reopening of Continental commerce in 1814,—nor the still more startling phenomena which a few years later attended England's return to specie-payments and a specie-currency,—nor statesmen setting themselves gravely down with the map before them to the final settlement of Europe, and, while the ink was yet fresh on their protocols, seeing all the results of their combined wisdom set at nought by the inexorable development of the fundamental principle which they had refused to recognize.
But we have seen these things, and, having seen them, unconsciously apply the knowledge derived from them in our judgment of events to which we have no right to apply it. We condemn errors which we should never have detected without the aid of a light which was hidden from our fathers, and will still be dwelling upon shortcomings which nothing could have avoided but a general diffusion of that wisdom which Providence never vouchsafes except as a gift to a few exalted minds. Every school-boy has his text-book of political economy now: but many can remember when these books first made their appearance in schools; and so late as 1820 the Professor of History in English Cambridge publicly lamented that there was no work upon this vital subject which he could put into the hands of his classes.
When, therefore, our fathers found themselves face to face with the complex questions of finance, they naturally fell back upon the experience and devices of their past history: they did as in such emergencies men always do,—they tried to meet the present difficulty without weighing maturely the future difficulties. The present was at the door, palpable, stern, urgent, relentless; and as they looked at it, they could see nothing beyond half so full of perplexity and danger. They hoped, as in the face of all history and all experience men will ever hope, that out of those depths which their feeble eyes were unable to penetrate something would yet arise in their hour of need to avert the peril and snatch them from the precipice. Their past history had its lessons of encouragement, some thought, and, some thought, of warning. They seized the example, but the admonition passed by unheeded.
Short as the chronological record of American history then was, that exchange of the products of labor which so speedily grows up into commerce had already passed through all its phases, from direct barter to bank-notes and bills of exchange. Men gave what they wanted less to get what they wanted more, the products of industry without doors for the products of industry within doors; and it was only when they felt the necessity of adding to their stock of luxuries or conveniences from a distance that they experienced the want of money. Prices naturally found their own level,—were what, when left to themselves they always are, the natural expression of the relations between demand and supply. Tobacco stood the Virginian in stead of money long after money had become abundant; procuring him corn, meat, raiment. More than once, too, it procured him something better still. In the very same year in which the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, history tells us, ninety maidens of "virtuous education and demeanor" landed in Virginia; the next year brought sixty more; and, provident industry reaping its own reward, he whose busy hands had raised the largest crop of tobacco was enabled to make the first choice of a wife. And it must have been an edifying and pleasant spectacle to see each stalwart Virginian pressing on towards the landing with his bundle of tobacco on his back, and walking deliberately home again with an affectionate wife under his arm.