THE MORAL OF THE CRISIS.

EVERY event in human life has its moral. This is true equally of the affairs of nations as of individuals; and in the former it acquires a grandeur and solemnity of character proportionate to the magnitude of its scale of operation, and the myriads of individual interests affected by it. To analyse and illustrate this moral, for the instruction of the present from the experience of the past, is the true object of history.

What, then, is the moral of the terrible crisis which has just convulsed the country? Of what national sin is it the consequence and punishment?-of what departure from those true principles of political morals on which all national happiness and prosperity must depend? That such must be the origin of such a result as we have witnessed within the present eventful year, none can doubt. The great moral law, that suffering is the invariable fruit of the seed planted by sin, is of universal truth. This question, then, becomes one of essential importance, which the American people ought to lay well to heart, and ponder earnestly.

On such occasions as the present, every member of the community is but too apt to lose sight of general considerations, in contemplating the consequences of the little portion of the evil that affects his own private concerns. Engrossed each in his own individual pursuits, we but rarely see the bearings of a mighty question of this nature rightly estimated by the public, by either friend or foe, at least until years have restored peace to the tempest of passions and opinions, and permitted the calm voice of reason and truth to be heard once more. It is particularly to be regretted that this is so generally the case with our journalists. It is but seldom, indeed, that we find these sentinels of the press true to the higher duties of their vocation. All their energies and thoughts are devoted solely to the party struggle in which they are incessantly engaged. This is never allowed to relax in vigor or bitterness; argument and illustration are exhausted for attack or defence of a disputed point; but meantime the vital principles of great questions are rarely at all, or at best but feebly, regarded in the strife, in comparison with the superficial considerations supplied by apparent expediency or narrow party interests. How seldom do we ascend to original truth for the solution of practical difficulty, or fairly attempt to educe the great political moral with which every public question is pregnant, from the calamities or distresses which, even in their most embarrassing forms, never fail to assert the immortality of principle, the undeviating excellence of right and

truth. And yet it is precisely such times that afford the surest test of political principle, and of the truth or error, the essential goodness or evil, of particular doctrines, upon which difference of opinion may exist among us.

The enemies of the democratic cause have not failed to profit by the present calamitous period, to renew the assaults on the democratic Administration which has been at the head of affairs during the last eight or nine years, which had almost seemed to have exhausted their fury. It is charged with the whole responsibility of the heavy complication of evils which has fallen, with combined action, within the present year, upon the country. We are told to look at the prostrate credit, bankrupt commerce, stagnated business, and worthless currency, which we have seen around us, for the legitimate fruits of those doctrines so triumphantly sustained by the popular majority, in the late Administration, and so strongly asserted by the present. The acerbity of party feeling has invaded the recesses of private life farther than it had ever proceeded before; lips unused to curse' have learned to join in execration of men and measures, which ignorance has been taught to believe have brought wanton ruin on all held most dear. It has been, indeed, a fearful tempest through which the vessel of the Administration has had to ride; nothing could have availed to save it from its howling fury, but its sheet-anchors of honesty and truth to the principles of democracy. These have, however, sufficed, and will ever continue to suffice, to bear it safely through all. The storm has now expended itself, and has begun rapidly to abate; the clouds are breaking up the heavy pall which for a time seemed to enshroud the whole heavens in a portentous darkness, and their black masses are already beginning to roll away; the atmosphere has been purified of the evil elements with which it had gradually become surcharged; the hour of peril has tried men's souls; and the vessel of state is now not only safe from actual danger, but has a fairer prospect extending indefinitely before it than ever before.

The history of the great financial revolution now in progress, and not far from its consummation, will make one of the most remarkable chapters in the annals of free institutions yet known to the world. It affords a very striking instance of the self-rectifying power of a free system of government, under whatever accumulation of evil influences may have been permitted, by long incaution or error of opinion on the part of the mass of the people, to overgrow the social body. It contains a most instructive illustration of the natural developement of evil principles to results not only pernicious to the society, but in the very act, also, happily selfdestructive to themselves.

It is not necessary to go back to a history of the late catastrophe and its causes. It is written in general terms, with a pencil of light, in

the admirable Executive state paper communicated by the President to Congress, and doubtless familiar to every reader of these pages. There can be no doubt that the almost universal public opinion has now fully settled down upon the main ideas of its historical view of the subject, whatever party differences of opinion may exist as to the causes of causes, or as to the future course rendered proper by their existing results. A general over-action, over-borrowing and over-lending, over-buying and over-selling, over-speculating and over-spending, over-importing and relative under-producing and exporting all growing out of the common parent of evil-overbanking, contain the sum and substance of the cause of the late convulsion.

That the whole accumulated and varied evil is the natural fruit of the banking system which has gradually grown up amidst us till it has overshadowed the whole land, is virtually admitted by all parties. The admission is made in the fullest terms by the advocates of a National Bank, when they insist upon a powerful institution of that character, as the only means of regulating the inherent propensity to evil of the system, forgetful not only that the difference between them is one only of size and power, and not of nature; but also of the fact that a bank of that description has been in active operation throughout the whole period, and has not only shared the common fate of the rest, and exhibited the same tendencies and the same results, but in a more signal manner and degree than the generality of the smaller institutions. The peculiar friends of the State Bank system make the same admission, when, while contending that it has not failed,' and proposing to renew the now selfdissolved connection between it and the Government, they admit the necessity of a reform, which they idly imagine is to be effected by the influence of the General Government on the small number of banks in which its revenue (hereafter to be within the limits of its economical expenses,) is to be deposited.

This banking system, which has proved the one main source of the disease with which our social body has been afflicted, has been based, as not one of its most devoted advocates can pretend to deny, on principles directly at variance with the fundamental ideas of our democracy and our whole theory of political morals-and its evil results, if they should be an instructive warning, ought not to be a subject of surprise. To have indulged in it in the manner in which we have permitted ourselves to do, was in itself a great national sin and folly which could not but bring with it its own eventual chastisement. Its two leading ideas have been false and anti-democratic-the one a violation of the great principle of equality of rights, by conferring exclusive privileges, involving all the essential viciousness of monopoly, on a favored and fortunate few, to create and lend the currency, and thus to derive a vastly dispro

portionate profit from their actual capital; the other, the assumption by our governments, Federal and State, of the function of regulating the whole business concerns of the community, by all this artificial banking legislation, instead of trusting to the intelligence and common sense of the people, and the natural healthy action of the free trade principle, with its counterpoising forces of voluntary association and competition. This has been a great national error, and we have suffered and are suffering its meet penalty -we have sown the wind and have reaped the whirlwind. However, the consolation remains, that adversity has still its precious jewel in its head;' and if we are paying dearly for our experience of the true principles of government, the knowledge will prove eventually well worth its price.

The height to which the supremacy of this great banking interest had grown throughout the country, is not easy to be fully appreciated. The acquiescence in it was almost universal; and in our cities particularly, its ascendency was absolute and all paramount, seeming to rest on as broad and deep a basis as the strength of the eternal hills. It claimed the merit of all the prosperity of the country. The press appeared but the creature of its pleasure; and few individuals indeed, connected in any way with mercantile business, would ever dream of hazarding the temerity of questioning its claims to public gratitude, or its vested rights to a perpetuity of its profitable privileges. If any one was so rash and so reckless of prudential considerations as to give public utterance to such treasonable sentiments of lèze-majesté, wo to him! Even though his name should be one which, before, every lip had delighted to honor as his country's pride and boast,-though he might be entitled to the privilege of that sacred few on whom all nations unite in invoking 'blessings and eternal praise,' as the first poet of his country, and in the first rank of those of his age, and though he might be known to be in private life all that is most worthy of respect and affection, -yet wo to him if guilty of this 'unpardonable sin!' He would be persecuted with a tempest of scorn and odium, and assailed with the rudest violence of denunciation, as a pest and common nuisance to society, against which nothing, indeed, but the highest and noblest principles could enable such an one to bear up. This spectacle we have seen; and we have seen, too, that colossal power, which was able to exert this stupendous social tyranny over the freedom of opinion and discussion, prostrated, by its own weight, to the earth. There is a grand moral in that spectacle; and it has been embodied by the distinguished poet referred to himself, whose muse has never sung under a nobler inspiration than that of the cause of democratic truth, in a lyric (which may be found on an early page of our present Number) worthy equally of that cause and of his own fame.

The credit system' had gradually expanded and diffused itself, so as to swallow up the whole business of society, in all its departments. Instead of being confined to its natural and proper sphere, of filling up the interval necessarily existing between the inception of legiti mate enterprise and the realization of its returns, it gradually extended to all the minor concerns of life, so as even to include the daily consumption of personal necessaries. The most minute retail, as well as the most enormous wholesale business, was based to a great extent on credit principles. From the largest importer or manufacturer down to the pettiest tradesman and his humblest customer, all equally, in their respective degrees, bought and sold, produced and consumed, ate, drank, and wore, on credit,—that is to say, on anticipation. This morbidly overgrown system, teeming with the worst influences of moral evil, thus ramified out to myriads of minutest fibres, received its perpetual sustenance and stimulus from the banks. The entire business community-and there are but few of our citizens who do not fall within that designationbecame thus dependent, as it were, for its life-blood, on these institutions. They stood in the perpetual relation of applicants for, and dispensers of, 'accommodation,'-of the means of conducting their daily business to earn their daily bread. "Favors" is the word grown into universal use, both by the dealer who petitions, and the director who grants. It has well, indeed, been said that words are things. The new words which, from time to time, grow up, afford the truest indices of the growth of new ideas and usages; and when it is remembered that the "favor" referred to is that of being permitted to pay an interest of six or seven per cent., at intervals of two or three months, for the difference between the artificial credit of a special legislative charter and the natural sound credit, well secured and endorsed, of private enterprise and industry, that single word ought to have sufficed ere now to arouse the independence of every free American citizen, to demand a reform of a system which thus places him, and the whole business community, in such a relation of dependence on the limited number of individuals who direct it and reap its profits.

The chartered advantages, and artificial public character, attaching to these institutions, secure to them virically the monopoly of the business of money-lending; as it is only in periods of pressure (the periodical effect of the natural fluctuations of the system) that private capital, not embarked in the institutions themselves, is attracted to take part in it by the hope of usurious profit-and thea only through the pernicious agency of the broker. And when, in addition to this. perpetual dependence of all the commercial interests of the country upon the system, we take into consideration the social influence of the countless hosts of persons of the highest respectability, wealth, and education, connected with it, as officers, directors, stockholders,