olden days, the reaction will set in, and
happy shall we be if it is not followed by a political _delirium
tremens_.

To-day we are living in and for the present alone. Men's minds are so
completely absorbed in the wonderful events that are constantly passing
around them, in the startling _denouements_ that each day brings forth,
that their attention is entirely distracted from that future to which we
are inevitably tending. And this not because that future is of little
importance, but because nearer and more vital interests are staring us
in the face, in which it is involved, and upon which it depends--a
nearer and more portentous future, which we must ourselves control and
shape, else the farther state will be utterly beyond our influence,
fixed in the channel of a malignant and ever-grovelling fate. The great
question now is, how soonest to end the war prosperously to ourselves;
and until this problem, involving our very existence, is solved, the
future, with all its prospects, good or bad, is left to take care of
itself, and rightly, too; for in the event of our present success, our
future will be in our own hands, while, if we fail, it will be fixed and
irrevocable, without the slightest reference to our interests or our
exertions. And yet, natural as this fact may seem, it is a little
singular that, while thousands of minds are eagerly searching for light
upon the question of the future of the American negro, few are found to
inquire what is to be our own. Strange that one exciting topic should so
fill men's minds and monopolize their sympathies as to entirely exclude
other questions of greater importance, and bearing more directly upon
our present and vital interests. Yet so it is, and so it has been in all
ages of the world, though, happily, the hallucination does not last for
any very extended period; for there is a compensation in human as well
as in inanimate nature, which, in its own good time, brings mind to its
proper balance by the harsh remedy of severe and present necessity, and
so retrieves the errors of a blind past.

Yet, absorbed as is the popular mind in the stirring events of the war,
and dull as all other themes may seem in comparison, it may not be
without interest to examine, in connection with our future, some of
those facts which are now floating about at random on the surface of
society, waiting for some hand to gather and arrange them in the
treasure house of prophecy. And in so doing, let