The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I | Page 3

one hand and with the other upholding the institution that constituted at
once its motive and its strength. Time has brought policy and justice to
shake hands together at the right moment on the same road, and made
that respectable and acceptable as a military necessity which was once
repudiated as a fanaticism. Time has brought out the President's
Emancipation Proclamation, and established it on a firm basis in the
judgment and consent of all wise and true loyal men, North and
South--to the great discomfiture of sundry politicians--the utterances of
some of whom not long ago can be no otherwise taken than as the
revelation and despairing death wail of disconcerted schemes. Strange
that men whose whole lives have been passed in forecasting public
opinion for their political uses, should have rushed upon the thick
bosses of the great shield of the public will, which begirts the President
and his Emancipation Proclamation;--for certainly all the railing at
radicalism, which we heard in certain quarters last summer, was in fact
nothing but the expression of disappointment and chagrin at the
emancipation policy of the President, and that too at a time when that
policy had come to be accepted by the great body of the loyal people of
the nation (including all the eminent Southern loyalists), as not only
indispensable to the national salvation, but desirable in every view.
Strange that at such a time, and among those once active and influential
in the formation of the Republican party--a party born of the roused
spirit of resistance to slavery aggressions--there should have been
found a single person unable to discern and to accept the inevitable
logic of events which was to make the extinction of slavery the only
wise, practicable, and truly loyal stand point. Strange that any
Republican should be disposed to put a stop to the 'irrepressible
conflict.' It was too late in the day to attempt the organization of a great,
victorious Conservative party by splitting up the old organizations. The
old organizations may fall to pieces. It is best, perhaps, they
should--but not to form a Conservative party. Conservatism is not now
to the popular taste. It means nothing but the saving of slavery, and the
great body of the loyal people now feel absolved from all obligation to

save it; they do not care to have it saved; and the vaticinations of those
prophets of evil who predicted disaster and ruin to the national cause
from the emancipation policy of the Government excite no
consternation in the loyal heart of the nation.
In a review of the conduct of the war, how little reason appears for
regret and how much for satisfaction in regard to all the great measures
of the Government!
THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM.
The successful working of the financial system has demonstrated the
wisdom of its principles. Instead of following the old wretched way of
throwing an immense amount of stocks into market at a sacrifice of
fifteen to thirty per cent., the Government has got all the money it
wanted at half or a little more than half the usual rate of interest. It
would have been better if the currency had been made to consist wholly
of United States legal-tender notes, fundable in six per cent.,
bonds--with a proper provision for the interest and for a sinking fund.
But the financial system adopted is a matter of satisfaction, apart from
its admirable success in furnishing the Government with the means to
carry on the war: it is the inauguration of sounder principles on
currency than have heretofore prevailed, which, if unfolded and carried
legitimately out, will give the country the best currency in the
world--perfectly secured, uniform in value at every point, and liable to
no disastrous expansions and contractions. The notion that any great
industrial, manufacturing, and commercial nation can conduct its
business--any more than it can carry on a great war--with a specie
currency alone, is indeed exploded; but the notion that a paper currency
to be safe must be based on specie, still prevails--although the currency
furnished by the thousands of banks scattered throughout the country
has never been really based upon the actual possession of specie to the
extent of more than one fifth of the amount in circulation. It may be the
doctrine will never come to prevail that a specie basis in whole or in
part is no more indispensable to a sound and safe paper currency than
an exclusive specie currency is possible or desirable in a country like
this. It may be that the people will never come to believe that a

legal-tender paper currency, issued exclusively by the National
Government--based upon the credit of the nation, constituting a lien
upon all the property of the country, and proportioned in amount of
issue to the