a high tariff is needed;—your theory is at least consistent, however it may have worked in practice. But a high protective tariff is an impossibility, because it can be attained only by favor of the Federal legislature; and, as we all know, at the door of that legislature stands the inexorable shape of the Slave Power, which consults no interest but its own in the management of government, and which will never make a concession to the manufacturers or the merchants of the North, unless it be to purchase some new act of baseness, or bind them in some new chains of servility.—But have you inquired whether that flood of paper is necessary? We frankly tell you that we do not believe it is; we believe that a better system is possible,—to be brought about, not by greater restrictions on banking, but by greater freedom; and we only regret that we have not now space to discuss that faith with you in all its reasons and results. We hope to be permitted to do so at some other time. Meanwhile, let us rejoice that the whole subject is in a position to be frankly discussed. A few years ago, when the question of the currency was a question of party politics, there was no aspect in which it could be presented, which did not arouse all the restless jealousies of party prejudice. If you talked of hard-money, you were denounced as a Benton bullionist; if you talked of credit, you were called a Whig banker, plotting to devour the poor; and the calmest phrases of science were turned into the shibboleths of an internecine warfare. A better hour has come, and let us improve it to our mutual edification.
SONNET.
The Maple puts her corals on in May,
While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling,
To be in tune with what the robins sing,
Plastering new log-huts ’mid her branches gray;
But when the Autumn southward turns away,
Then in her veins burns most the blood of Spring,
And every leaf, intensely blossoming,
Makes the year’s sunset pale the set of day.
O Youth unprescient, were it only so
With trees you plant, and in whose shade reclined,
Thinking their drifting blooms Fate’s coldest snow,
You carve dear names upon the faithful rind,
Nor in that vernal stem the cross foreknow
That Age may bear, silent, yet unresigned!
