of honorable members to associate their names with the particular
nostrum that is to build up our national system again. In a country
where, unhappily, any man may be President, it is natural that a means
of advertising so efficacious as this should not be neglected. But
really, we do not see how Congress can be blamed for not being ready
with a plan definite and precise upon every point of possible
application, when it is not yet in possession of the facts according to
whose varying complexion the plan must be good or bad. The question
with us is much more whether another branch of the government,--to
which, from its position and its opportunity for a wider view, the
country naturally looks for initiative suggestion, and in which a few
months ago even decisive action would have been pardoned,--whether this
did not let the lucky moment go by without using it. That moment was
immediately after Mr. Lincoln's murder, when the victorious nation was
ready to apply, and the conquered faction would have submitted without
a murmur to that bold and comprehensive policy which is the only wise
as it is the only safe one for great occasions. To let that moment slip
was to descend irrecoverably from the vantage ground where
statesmanship is an exact science to the experimental level of
tentative politics. We cannot often venture to set our own house on
fire with civil war, in order to heat our iron up to that point of easy
forging at which it glowed, longing for the hammer of the master-smith,
less than a year ago. That Occasion is swift we learned long ago from
the adage; but this volatility is meant only of moments where force of
personal character is decisive, where the fame or fortune of a single
man is at stake. The life of nations can afford to take less strict
account of time, and in their affairs there may always be a hope that
the slow old tortoise, Prudence, may overtake again the opportunity
that seemed flown by so irrecoverably. Our people have shown so much of
this hard-shelled virtue during the last five years, that we look with
more confidence than apprehension to the result of our present
difficulties. Never was the common-sense of a nation more often and
directly appealed to, never was it readier in coming to its conclusion
and making it operative in public affairs, than during the war whose
wounds we are now endeavoring to stanch. It is the duty of patriotic
men to keep this great popular faculty always in view, to