Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 316 pages of information about Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1..

Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 316 pages of information about Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1..
eternities—­no second chance to us for evermore.’  Let us not forget the loves, the amenities and charities of social life.  Let us not forget that the education of the world must go on as ever, that the great virtues of charity and self-denial must more than ever be exercised, and that the discipline and perfection of our own characters is as ever our grand life-work.  Then let the angry waves of tumult dash up and froth at our feet, let the skies blacken and the tempest roar, God is over all.  This one thing we are to remember, and be cheerful.  Browning says: 

    ’God’s in his heaven—­
    All’s right with the world.’

THE CRISIS AND THE PARTIES.

From two points of view, the great and preeminently American nation vibrates at present in a crisis of immense historical significance.  The first is, that of the war between the United and so-called Confederate States, which is virtually a strife between Free Labor seeking to enlarge its sphere and retain its power against agricultural aristocracy maintained by slave labor.  All the energies and theories of industrial progress, of science, and of constant intellectual development; in a word, all that is most characteristic of ’the spirit of the Nineteenth Century,’ is enlisted on the one side; all that is fading out and wearing away, with all that characterizes the unwisest conservatism has taken its last stand on the other.  It is the old story of ’the generation which comes and of that which goes,’ reduced to the intense form of a fierce fight.  All of this—­but little understood within a very few years—­has been of late made generally intelligible on this side of the border, thanks, perhaps, as much to Mr. Hammond’s word ‘mudsill’ as to any other cause.  In the short sentence which declared that there should always exist, in every community, one ever-sunken and permanently degraded class, the great point of difference between the South and North was set forth in a form intelligible to the humblest capacity, and it was understood—­how well has been shown in many a bloody field.

The other crisis in which we are at present involved is domestic and purely political.  It is the growth of opposing political parties, and its existence is undoubtedly to be regretted, if we take only a superficial view of the causes of its birth.  We could all wish for some time to come—­perhaps forever—­to see only a single Union-party, with all men, looking neither to the right nor the left, pushing steadily on to the great goal of unity, commercial development, and social progress.  But we forget that so surely as night follows day, even so surely, in every community, will there be a conservative section and a progressive; the ‘extreme right’ of the former consisting of frozen conservatives, advocating the preservation of every antiquated evil, because it has acquired in their eyes a halo of ‘respectability,’

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Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.