or later be tried, tested, and rejected. The
people are very patient, and they can be for a long time fooled with
this or that man's reputed honesty and ability. But we have come to the
time of trial, and the people will soon find who is false and what is
_true_.

It is not to be expected that in one year, or in two, the country will
be rid of all the old, corrupt politicians and demagogues who
continually work every subject of public interest into the question of a
'party.' But it is gratifying to observe that, whether Radical or
Conservative, such men are beginning to be regarded with contempt. In
times like these, _we_, at least, blame no man for honestly advocating
any policy which he thinks will aid the Union cause. But the country was
never more disgusted than it is at present, with men who use politics as
a mere trade by which to live. The infamy which has attached to the
miserable and imbecile Buchanan, that type of degraded, pettifogging
diplomacy, is rapidly extending to his whole tribe--and their name is
legion. It is significant that a bank, whose notes bore as vignette a
portrait of the ex-honorable ex-President, has been obliged to call them
in, and substitute another device, since so many of the bills were
marked beneath the picture with such words as 'traitor,' and 'Judas
Iscariot.'

The _people_ are 'all right' in this struggle: but they are awaking very
rapidly to the fact that those in power _must_ be honest or able. The
coming year is to witness either a grand sifting or a tremendous
protest, whose thunder-tones will be heard through all history. It is
all very well for conservatives to lay the blame on their enemies and
yell for their blood; to recommend the assassination of Charles Sumner,
as has been done by one Boston journal; or the hanging of all leading
Radicals, as recommended time and again by the New-York _Herald_; but
this will not satisfy the people who can not see how the country is to
be saved by holding up and aiding the enemy. Neither, on the other hand,
will the people long regard with favor any persons of the opposite
party, who are suspected of having managed the war for their own selfish
purposes. The old hacks who can only live for personal preferment and
for plunder, will be found out, and their places taken by honester and
younger men, whose minds will have been shaped, not in by-gone political
pettifogging, but in the great earnest needs of the times--in honor and
in truth.