Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[748] apprehension of confiscation, and other kindred measures of oppression, before they can be expected to go to work and improve their condition. They must be disabused of the idea that the new system of labour is to be demoralized by political theories, before giving it their confidence, and enlarging the experiment of it. The troubled sea of politics must be composed before the industry of the South can return to its wonted channels, and reach at last some point of approximation to former prosperity.

The financiers at Washington consider it of the utmost importance that the South should be able to bear its part of the burden of the national debt, and by its products for exchange contribute to the reduction of this debt to a specie basis. The whole edifice of Northern prosperity rests on the unstable foundation of paper credit. Every man in the North is intelligibly interested in the earliest development of the material prosperity of the South. It is not by political agitation that this interest is to be promoted; not under the hand of the Fanaticism that sows the wind that there are to grow up the fruits of industry. When the Southern people obtain political reassurance, and are able to lift the shield of the Constitution over their heads, they will be prepared for the fruitful works of peace; they will be ready then for the large and steady enterprises of industry. All history shows and all reason argues that where a people are threatened with political changes, and live in uncertainty of the future, capital will be timid, enterprise will be content with make-shifts, and labour itself, give but an unsteady hand to the common implements of industry.

He must be blind who does not perceive in the indications of Northern opinion and in the series of legislative measures consequent upon the war the sweeping and alarming tendency to Consolidation. It is not only the territorial unity of the States that is endangered by the fashionable dogma of the day, but the very cause of republican government itself. A war of opinions has ensued upon that of arms, far more dangerous to the American system of liberties than all the ordinances of Secession and all the armed hosts of the Confederates.

The State Rights put in question by the propositions we have referred to in Congress, are not those involved in the issue of Secession, and, therefore, decided against the South by the arbitration of the war. The Radical programme, which we have noted above, points the illustration that the war did not sacrifice the whole body of State Rights, and that there was an important residuum of them outside of the issue of Secession, which the people of the South were still entitled to assert, and to erect as new standards of party. It is precisely those rights of the States which a revolutionary party in Congress would deny, namely: to have their Constitutional representation, to decide their own obligations of debt, to have their own codes of crimes and penalties, and to deal with their own domestic