Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/64

58 desired that it might rest in that most honourable grave where it already lay. That rich and refined Americans are disaffected to the institutions of their country is a very common belief, to which the language of some of them when in this country lends colour. But I have seen rich and highly refined Americans, accustomed to the best society of Europe, rejoice as they approached their home, though that home was at the time the scene of civil war; and in this struggle not a few of that class gave noble proof (proof never to be forgotten by their countrymen) that the rich, as well as the poor, may be heartily loyal to the government of the people.

As the Americans were said to be shedding only the blood of hirelings, so they were said to be spending only the money of posterity. I will not be guilty of extenuating either the evils of a national debt, or the criminality of laying the burdens of the present generation on posterity, if the State can possibly be saved by any other means. The Americans have, unhappily, borrowed a great sum. Other nations, not only when fighting for existence, but when fighting for mere ambition, had done the same before them: but, unlike other nations, they seem disposed to make an effort to pay what they have borrowed; and if they have burdened posterity, they have really secured it against war. They were doomed by their critics to be, or rather they were already, bankrupt. But now they have become a salutary example of a nation determining to reduce its debt; though the way in which they proceed to the reduction of the debt, by first reducing their armaments, is not so clearly perceived. Ignorant of finance, which had never been a pressing subject in a country without great establishments and heavy taxes, they committed at first