till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to buy bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the platform of the horse-cars; till the music-grinders cease because none will pay them; till there are no peaches in the windows at twenty-four dollars a dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples selling at the street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;—­but till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is carrying us farther and farther, every hour, out of the influence of the great failing which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin which was our fatal inheritance!

Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field of discussion we are just leaving.

On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one, at half-past four of the clock in the morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of South Carolina at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United States.  Its ball carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty years, shaped and cooled in the mould of malignant deliberation.  Its wad was the charter of our national existence.  Its muzzle was pointed at the stone which bore the symbol of our national sovereignty.  As the echoes of its thunder died away, the telegraph clicked one word through every office of the land.  That word was war!

War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is claimed by its true parents.  This war has eaten its way backward through all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of ordinances and statutes; through all the casuistries of divines, experts in the differential calculus of conscience and duty; until it stands revealed to all men as the natural and inevitable conflict of two incompatible forms of civilization, one or the other of which must dominate the central zone of the continent, and eventually claim the hemisphere for its development.

We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms which the wise Romans, the world’s lawgivers, always recognized as above all special enactments.  We have come to that solid substratum acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise:  “Necessity itself which reduces things to the mere right of Nature.”  The old rules which were enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless “as moonlight on the dial of the day.”  We have followed precedents as long as they could guide us; now we must make precedents for the ages which are to succeed us.

If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent, the current prices of United States stocks show that we value our nationality at only a small fraction of our wealth.  If we feel that we are paying too dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us recall those grand words of Samuel Adams: