r energies and resources. Forebodings
of a similar kind haunt the imaginations of many of our own citizens.
The history of past wars and their results justify the anticipation.
Perchance all this may prove an unnecessary fear. It may happen that the
almost boundless recuperative energies of this young American
civilization of ours may be destined to astonish our enemies, our
friends, and ourselves, as much as the extent of our resources for
action have already done--that the strain put upon us, instead of
enfeebling us in the least, has been merely a healthy exercise for the
growing muscles and thews of a young giant just now ripening into a
first manhood, and never heretofore called upon for any adequate
exertion to display his strength. We once heard an enthusiastic and
progressive orator, referring to the marvels of modern development,
utter, with a sublime and audacious eloquence, the startling assertion
that '_Experience is a fool._' There is a sense, no doubt, in which the
sentiment is true. Neither the growth, nor the inherent power, nor the
elasticity of the rebound from seeming exhaustion, nor the immense
acceleration of the rapidity of the future career of the American
people, is to be safely measured by a reference to what has occurred
with former nationalities, in other and different times. Our experience
of the future, whatever it may be, will be, no doubt, essentially
different from any of the past.

But assume, on the contrary, that the prediction is essentially well
founded; that we have before us, in the immediate future, a period of
extreme exhaustion, depression, and even of temporary discouragement in
the public mind. All this need not, to the philosophic mind, cause the
slightest apprehension of permanent evil results--of any serious check
even, to our inevitable destiny, as the heirs of unbounded prosperity
and the leaders of the vanguard of the progress of the world. A halt, in
this sense, in the rapidity of our career, would be only the necessary
price of our immense and invaluable achievement, the elimination of
chattel slavery from the constitution of our social and political life.
We have still other and great social evils remaining behind. The
scientific and harmonious adjustment of the relations of capital to
labor, of the employers to the employed, in the constitution of our free
competitive society as it will still remain after Slavery is dead, is
the next great practical question which wi