20 



at home, and by the increased influx of immigration from 

 abroad."* 



There are those who cannot look at the future without 

 anxiety and dread : — minds, apparently so constituted as 

 never to see the silvery lining of the cloud. To this class 

 belong the alarmists and the croakers, — birds of ill-omen 

 limited to no clime or age. These are the men, who, while 

 our war was raging, could see no light ahead. Through the 

 dust and smoke of battle, they could discern no glorious, 

 crowning victory — no bright avatar of freedom — no honor- 

 able and lasting peace. Foreign intervention — a discordant 

 North — the utter exhaustion of both sides, after long, long 

 years of fatal conflict ; — such were some of the spectres that 

 affrighted our too timid fellew-citizens. 



And even now, when peace has actually come, so suddenly 

 and so auspiciously, — when every sound of war is hushed, — 

 and all its murderous weapons lately raised in fierce hostility 

 have been laid down, — now, when slavery, fruitful source of 

 evil and dire cause of the rebellion, is confessedly extinct, — 

 still our unhappy friends retain the anxious seat. How are 

 we to re-construct our disjointed Union ! What is to be the 

 condition and fate of the emancipated black man ? Will the 

 right of suffrage be made impartial and universal? How are 

 we to pay the principal, or even the interest of the national 

 debt ? Such are some of the great questions which puzzle 

 and appall our self-appointed woe-presaging soothsayers. 



It would be preposterous to deny that there have been, 

 during the mighty contest through which we have just passed, 

 periods of peril and of doubt — moments of intense solicitude 

 which tried the stoutest and bravest souls. It would be just 



*"Mr. Kennedy, in his Census Report for 1860, informs us that a thresh- 

 ing machine in Ohio, worked by three men, with some assistance from the 

 farm-hands, did the -work of seventy flails, and that thirty steam threshers 

 only "were required to prepare for market the wheat crop of two counties in 

 Ohio, which would have required the labor of forty thousand men." See 

 Mr. E. B. BiGELOw's article on Modern Improvements and Our National 

 Debt, in the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1865. 



