by the whites
who now recognize the Union. How long can the South continue to float
such a currency? Does it not already equal or exceed the paper currency
of our Revolution, which became utterly worthless, notwithstanding our
nation achieved its independence?

Our fathers, long before the surrender at Yorktown, resorted to specie,
to the bank of Morris, and to French and Dutch subsidies: but how is the
South to command bank-notes or specie, or to buy arms, powder, or
provisions, or to satisfy soldiers with a currency such as has been
described, or to make new issues at the rate of twenty-five millions per
month?

At Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, gold ranges from 125 to 150
per cent. premium. Must not this advance require a double or triple
issue of currency, namely, fifty to seventy-five millions per month, to
accomplish as much as has already been effected? And how as has already
been effected? and how long can such a currency be floated within a
contracting circle, and in the face of our new levies and our unbounded
national credit? If the war should last another year, and this
depreciating currency can be floated at all, it is safe to infer from
the history of the past that the debt of the South must increase at
least one thousand millions. Under the pressure of such growing weight
its end may be safely predicted.

Thus far in the contest the South has possessed one great advantage. The
planter's son, reared to no profession, in a region where the pursuits
of trade and the mechanic arts have little honor, has been accustomed
from childhood to the use of the horse and rifle. In most of the towns
of the South you will find a military academy, and here the young cadet
has been trained to arms and qualified for office: we have no such class
in the Free States, except a few graduates from West Point. Under such
officers, a motley army has been collected, composed of foreigners who
have toiled in Southern cities as draymen and porters, of Northern
clerks driven by coercion or sheer necessity to enlist, the poor whites,
the outcasts of the South, a class the most degraded in public
estimate,--a class which has the respect of neither the white man nor
the negro. These people inhabit to a great extent the scrub-oak or
black-jack forests, the second growth which has sprung up on exhausted
plantations. Destitute of schools, churches, and newspapers, unable to
read or write, without culture, generally steeped in