The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 | Page 7

take their positions among the 'upper ten thousand,' and are
treated with a deference to which they have all their lives been
strangers, by virtue of a successful contract or a towering speculation.
The effect of such a state of things upon our civilization is easy to be
seen. A low motive is sure to bring down its followers to its own level.
A people without a lofty and ennobling object is sure to fall into decay.
The grasping spirit which everywhere pervades our society is fast
lowering our people to the level of a race of mercenary jobbers. Truth,
justice, honor, purity, and even religion, are in a great measure lost
sight of in the general scramble for gold, until the strictest integrity, the
most self-sacrificing honesty, are beginning to be looked upon as
marvels, and we have won for ourselves among the nations of the world
the unenviable title of worshippers of the 'almighty dollar.' Religion
itself is twisted and distorted into every imaginable shape to bring it
into harmony with our all-absorbing pursuit: all our ideas of public
policy and of social progress are made to depend upon and modified by
this unworthy motive. We mean not to include those individuals who,
with loftier motives and a true appreciation of man's spiritual
capabilities, are prominent among us, battling earnestly in the cause of
true progress; we are speaking of the mass of our population. Those

few are the goodly leaven who are yet to prove the regeneration of our
race. Bad as is the state of affairs in this respect, it will, if left to itself,
become infinitely worse as each succeeding year rolls around, for the
spirit of greed is progressive in its nature, growing fatter and fatter
upon its success.
Yet, in another point of view, this same strife for wealth is one great
secret of American prosperity and progress. It is the motive power to
that energy which has peopled the wilderness, erected as if by magic a
mighty republic among the savage wilds, and, above all, spread
American ideas, and with them the germ of human liberty, over the
whole broad earth. To this spirit of greed upon our shores the Old
World owes much of its advancement and most of those useful
inventions which are fast revolutionizing humanity itself. But we are
not considering it in this light; we are viewing it in its moral aspect,
that respect in which it most strongly affects true civilization, which
must soon fall away and lapse into the condition of the ages long past,
if it be not sustained by an enduring moral and religious element. The
moral advancement must keep pace with the intellectual, else the latter
will some day reach that point where extremes meet, and have its weary
journey to commence again.
It is to be hoped that this evil is already on the wane. It is to be hoped
that the present stirring up of our society from its uttermost depths,
with its consequent exploding of worn-out theories, which have
hitherto held their places only through our national lethargy--with its
sweeping away of old-time prejudices, and mingling together of
elements which have hitherto existed distinct and aloof from each other,
will result in bringing true merit to the surface, in awakening our
people to a loftier appreciation of the good and the true, thereby
establishing a higher moral standard among us; that purer motives will
henceforth actuate our society. The fears which are entertained by some
that the present war will prove a severe shock to our civilization, are
not sustained by the facts which are everywhere appearing around us.
The frequent demands upon the generosity and forbearance of a great
people, the constant calls for the exercise of the noblest qualities, the
most self-sacrificing devotion, and that too in support of a great

principle rather than of any present material interest, the very necessity
for an exalted civilization and intellectual development on the part of
the masses, which shall enable them to see in that principle the
groundwork of all their future well-being, both as regards material
prosperity and political position, are constantly bringing before the
people, in a clearer light than ever before, the blessings of honor and
uprightness, the necessity of national purity, and developing a moral
element in our midst, whose good effects will far outbalance the
ephemeral and spasmodic immorality and vice which a state of war
usually engenders. Our people are becoming acquainted with those
blessings of individual well-doing and those principles of philanthropy
to which they have for so long been comparative strangers. And it is
this, together with the unveiling, through the present convulsion, of
those errors, both in our political system and in our society, which have
so nearly proved our ruin, which will