s last public utterance was the letter on American affairs to our
minister at Copenhagen, which reached England in the American papers the
day before his death,--and that one of his last acts was to send from
his death-bed a contribution to a poor and paralyzed American sailor who
with his family was suffering in London, without any personal appeal
having been made to him. These were the last pulses of a heart that beat
only for humanity.

Mr. Cobden was one of the finest speakers I have ever heard. There was a
play as of summer lightning about his eloquence, which, whilst it did
not strike and crash opponents, was purifying the atmosphere of the
debate, and lightning up every detail of fact, so that error could not
flourish in his presence, nor even well hide itself. There was a
terseness and massiveness in his speech, curiously blended with subtilty
and fervor. A question of finance would grow pathetic under his touch,
and he could create a soul under the ribs of statistics. He might vie
with Lowell's ideal Jonathan for "calculating fanaticism" and "cast-iron
enthusiasm." But, after all, what more need be said than the epitaph
proposed for his grave: "_He gave the people bread_"?

MODERN IMPROVEMENTS AND OUR NATIONAL DEBT.

At the commencement of the Rebellion it was the general opinion of
statesmen and financiers in other countries, and the opinion of many
among ourselves, that our resources were inadequate to a long
continuance of the war, and that it must soon terminate under pecuniary
exhaustion, if from no other cause. Our experience has shown that this
view was fallacious. After having sustained for several years the
largest army known to modern times, our available resources seem to be
unimpaired. The country is, indeed, largely in debt; but its powers of
production are so great that it can undoubtedly meet all future demands
as easily as it has met those of the past.

The ability or inability of a nation engaged in war to sustain heavy
public expenses is to be measured not so much by its nominal debt as by
the relation which the sum of its _production_ bears to that of its
necessary _consumption_. A nation heavily in debt may continue to make
large public expenditures and still prosper and increase in wealth, if
its powers of production are correspondingly large also. It is a fact of
the most encouraging kind, that the power of production exhibited by the
United States far exceeds, in proportion to