efficient head. Yet there is original power in the nation. The man is somewhere who is to shape the history of the country for the next half century. The rebels may have found their man, but we have not; and some of our most conspicuous leaders, who have been foremost to tell us of the good times that are coming as the result of their measures, shrink back affrighted from the ghosts that their own spell has raised, and are astonished that the water-imp, who is making a deluge by his everlasting pouring of water, will not sink back into his corner and become a broomstick or a blockhead, according to the old ballad, once more.

It may be that no great man appears to lead us because God, in his providence, means to make us a great people, and insists that we shall go alone or be our own leaders—a desirable result indeed, yet hard to reach without previous training under an effective master; for the great eras of the regeneration of the people have been ushered in by some commanding personage manifestly born for his high mission. All the Christian ages have repeated the first of these ages, and the born of God has led forth the procession of the new-born of humanity, as the incarnation precedes the regeneration. Generally the peo

well as of education, and we must trace to the | yet gone up, and the greatest movement known womb a portion of the elements of their power among nations has been thus far without an over the nation and the age. Thus Washington is not usually called a man of native genius; but surely we can not deny that he had peculiar native gifts for his position, and that his remarkable balance of character, his union of so much judgment with so much courage, such equanimity with force, such patience with high spirit, that this rare balance was the felicity of his birth as well as of his breeding, and we owe to his mother no small part of the good service that he has done to his country. We surely make a very sorry estimate even of genius when we limit it solely to intellectual originality, and deny it to signal active force, or allow genius to Shakspeare, Milton, and Burns, and deny it to Frederick, Napoleon, and Nelson. We have for a long time believed that there is a genius of the will quite as marked and inborn as that of the intellect or the imagination. What we want perhaps more than any thing else is a man of great will to put power into the right direction at this crisis of affairs. We seem to have men who think and speak and write very well, but no man of inspired force to be master of the situation. Our plan seems to have been good enough, and if what has been put upon paper had only been carried out with a mighty hand, the nation would have been saved before this. ple rally at the call of some providential leader; Andrew Jackson was not a man of any great and there is in all large bodies of men, like all intellectual originality; but he surely was an masses of matter, a certain passivity that waits original character, and by his native force of the touch of a master hand, the magic of a maswill he has left more traces of himself upon ter spirit, as the great ocean waits the rising of American history than any one of his great con- the moon to lift up its waters, and the broad temporaries. Daniel Webster, we think, over-acres look to the sunshine and the rain to soften threw Calhoun and Hayne in argument; but and fertilize their glebe. We as a people are what would the triumph in the Senate chamber ready for a leader, and if no man in keeping have amounted to if it had not been backed up with our good culture and moral convictions apby bayonet and cannon? What good would pears with the requisite gifts of command, we Webster's argument have done had not Jackson are in danger of being run away with by some sent the Frigate Constitution to Charleston Har-strong, unscrupulous man who may put himself bor, and threatened to hang the Nullifiers sky- at the head of the passions and interests of the high if they did not stop their nonsense? We hour. The devil will be likely to send us a leader have of late needed Jackson's iron will. If if we do not accept one from God, and there are James Buchanan had possessed it, he would not some mutterings and murmurs of the popular have left a broken nation to his successors, nor breath that do not seem to portend an avatar have allowed his Cabinet to brow-beat him and wholly from the celestial spheres. to plunder the Treasury and the arsenals. If Abraham Lincoln had had it, the rebellion apparently might long ago have been crushed, and we should not have been writing in our present vein of the uncertainties of the future. If our Generals had their fair share of it, their campaigns would not have been so feeble in result compared with the grandeur of their promise. Discipline undoubtedly goes far toward making á soldier; but a great soldier must have a good foundation to build upon, and native force of will is essential to his greatness. There is genius for the camp as well as for the Cabinet and the library.

We are waiting for a strong man to appear in the Cabinet or the field, and are ready to salute him by acclamation as hearty as ever shouted "God save the King!" But the shout has not

What is to move and lead our people this year or the next ten years? Who is the man, what is the idea, what the policy, what the end? Who knows? Our shrewdest wire-pullers have been puzzled to know what to do or which way to turn, and some of them have gone through as many attitudes, postures, marches, and counter-marches, as the figurantes of an old-fashioned dance, or the German cotillion. Our people are, in the main, a thoughtful, serious, and prudent people; yet what they will do, or whose lead they will follow, is less clear than it would otherwise be, from the fact that it does not take much to change votes enough from one side to the other to make the former minority the present majority. It would be easy to tell what our people would do, if every leading measure must have the assent of the great body of intelligent per

sons; but public action is not always a fair test measures that would merge the States in the naof the real weight or quality of public opinion, tion, or the nation in the States, have never been since a few thousand votes that bear in them- popular. The political system of America has selves no great intellectual or moral weight may been more and more distinctly defining itself shift the balancing power from one side to the since our Independence was declared; and it is other, and like the ballast-car on a steamboat as clear now as ever, that the old Constitution may make the vessel and all within it lean to was a fair and full embodiment of our organic the other side. A nation in its corporate capac-national life, and the will of our people, with short exceptional periods, confirms that stated distribution of powers.

But who can tell what is to come, now that the Deluge is upon us? After the Deluge, what? That is the great question. Are all State lines to be obliterated, and are we to be swallowed up, as some desire, by a great centralized authority? or are the States to usurp the National powers, and to set themselves up as independent sovereignties? Who can tell? The signs of the times are very odd in one respect. It is strange that the two portions of our country in arms against each other are in some respects acting precisely against their nominal theory; and while the seceding States are urging union so strongly with each other, the loyal States are foreboding, and in some respects provoking, disunion with each other. Secession is quite sure, in its own opinion, of being one, while Unionism is evidently afraid of becoming many. We have no great fears of the separation of the Northern States from each other, because we are confident that mutual interest, pride, history, and habit will keep them together. We are not disposed to discuss in these columns merely partisan questions; but we are free to say that the recent signs of reaction in our Northern States come less from want of loyalty to the National Government than from suspicion of excessive centralization, and from determination to preserve personal or local rights inviolate. It can not be denied that we have been in dan

ity must act as one mass, and the whole must move one way or the other, like a great boulder on the mountain side, which, however nicely poised upon its base and easily moved, perhaps by the hand of a child or the weight of a chamois, must move as one body, or as one body remain at rest. It is hard, of course, to predict how a sufficient number of persons may be acted upon to change the centre of gravity, and to turn the body politic from one side to the other. It is all the more hard to predict this, because, while some persons are changing in one direction, others are moving in the opposite direction; and the result depends not upon a single change, but upon the resultant of all the changing forces. Undoubtedly, if we watch all the moving elements either in any masses of matter or of persons, the tendencies in the course of time will be seen to arrange themselves according to a certain method, and the winds and the tides of nature and the movements of public opinion have a certain method in their seeming madness. Watch the winds and tides for an hour, and all may seem caprice, and you can not tell the will of the waters and the air; but continue the observation for a year, and a system of natural laws opens upon you, and you are ready to risk lives and property upon the result. So with the elements of public opinion. Their motions for a day or year seem to be arbitrary and capricious, wholly beyond the power of our calculation; but observe a nation through a course of years, and we note an approach to consistent and continu-ger of having our historic rights trenched upon ous habit, or to a historical and constitutional life both of ideas and purposes. There are, indeed, exceptional periods in the body politic as in the human body, when the general currents of circulation are changed, and the relations of functions are disturbed, or fevers and manias in society as in medicine. Yet these exceptions prove the rule, and every nation tends to resume its old ways after the revolutionary fit is over. The method of civilization is historic and evolutionary, not theoretic and revolutionary; and revolutions generally do good, not by breaking up the ancient order, but by removing the obstacles in the way of the rightful evolution of that order. Our American Revolution restored to us our liberty as British freemen, and guaranteed our lib-restores the States and the nation to normal and erty under laws very little different from the old colonial system. Our revolution was the method of evolution, and was historic, not merely ideal. Our institutions in the States and the Central Government are very much what they have been tending to become since the colonies were planted, and begun to approximate toward a central and protective head. We keep all the old habits of local liberty and central defense, and the extreme

in the heats of war and the necessary invigoration of the central authority. We ought to submit to all necessary military prerogative with patience and loyalty, yet we are sacredly to keep our essential liberties as citizens, and to resist all arbitrary arrests that trample upon State laws and personal security. We trust that a wholesome and not a pernicious use will be made of this jealousy of centralization, by suppressing the rebellion which is the occasion of it, and by making the nation so homogeneous and peaceful as to have no need of an enormous standing army, an increasing public debt, and a military dictator. If we finish the rebellion at once upon any system of established liberty and order that

stable relations, we resume our old health of circulation and simplicity of government. It is clear to us that of late the Central Government has had too much pressure of blood upon the head, and the concentration of so much patronage in the hands of a few is not well either for patron or client. The enormous peculation of contractors comes, we think, not so much from any marvelous personal depravity, as from excessive

temptation, and it is never well for the public Messiah began His life in a stable, and ended it virtue either for wine or money to flow in rivers upon a cross; and all succeeding ages have in through the land. The remedy for this excess- some way repeated the paradox. Thus far in ive centralization is to be found, not in cutting the war God has not fulfilled our impatient off the head, but in duly stirring the members, hopes, nor given us the expected return for the and so bringing the head to its proper health seas of blood and treasure. But that we have and functions. Sustain our fundamental laws, not won the good expected is no proof that we and return to our old equilibrium soon, and we have not won any good. We have developed can easily manage our debt, disband most of our powers that else would have slumbered; and we army, keep down turbulence at home, and re- have brought our country nearer than ever to buke insolence from abroad. our hearts by paying the price of blood, which, when loyally given, is never paid in vain. We can not read the record of the great disappointments of human hopes in history in utter despair, nor believe that noble purposes and deeds have ever utterly failed. Europe has not yet won all the liberty for which the zealots of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution labored, suffered, and died. Yet liberty has not lost but gained by their efforts; and even the despots whose will is called law are bound to respect the instincts of the age, and sometimes to do for the people better than the people have sometimes done for themselves. The annals of despotism are not therefore wholly without food for hope.

What is to be the immediate issue of the present quarrel we can not venture to predict, and in civil war, as in drought, all signs fail, and weather-prophets are ridiculous. The rebellion is stronger every way than we supposed-not only more determined, but more sagacious, persistent, and self-sacrificing, and able not only to bring a great force into the field, but to give it an intensity of purpose rarely equaled in history. How will time tell upon the two parties, and who will be the first to yield?-this is the question that time only can settle. Endurance wins, and in the long run bottom carries the day against speed. We have the most bottom, so far as numbers, arts, and wealth are concerned; but the persistent will-this is the enduring power; and he whose will is most abiding is upon the rock, while his vacillating rival is upon the drifting sand. Evidently there must be a limit to the persistency of one or both parties, and so enormous a fire must before long burn out. What both parties wish is clear; but what both really will is not so clear, and we wait for an unequivocal development of the will of the people as to the amount of life, and treasure, and tranquillity which they are determined to spend in the war.

We

Some things may occur to change the pulse of the people and create new social and political conditions. The rise of a great military leader would stir the heart of the nation anew, and the signs of a decided disposition in the Southern slaves to seize their own liberties under some commanding chief of their own blood would change the aspects of affairs both at home and abroad. wait, moreover, upon the action of European courts to a certain extent, and are quite sure that France would head a powerful mediation, if not a formidable intervention, if the way to do it were as clear as the will. As the signs now appear, the problem is not solved as to what the year is to bring forth, and we take comfort not so much in any rosy anticipations of immediate victory and peace, as in trust in the general drift of our civilization, and in the benign providence of Him who is Lord of Nations and Light of Men. Our religion does not enable us to write history in advance, and predict the issue of battles, crops, and elections; but it does assure us of the final triumph of Christian civilization in its faith, energy, and humanity. Yet God's ways are always taking us by surprise, and few things go as we expected. The Christian religion began not as Jew or Gentile believed. For its

Our greatest hope is not, however, to rest upon the success of this or that cherished plan, but upon the accomplishment of our providential destiny. Our ruling ideas and forces are to be determined and adjusted, and we are to decide what shall be the nature of the relation that shall exist between the only two sections of our country that are marked by characteristics essentially diverse. That North and South must in some respects always differ as they always have done, we sufficiently affirm when we say that heat and cold are not the same, and the black race is not the white one; but that North and South shall always, or for many years quarrel, we can not believe. The two will adjust their relations to each other in some way that shall be for the common good, and in the end there must be virtually but one nation in which the dualism of character shall secure true unity of life, as in the family the household is all the more one because the husband and the wife are not the same, but are man and woman.

The prophet we can not play, but the patriot and the moralist we ought to be in good earnest without any play. We are to stand by our country, and, in simple loyalty, sustain its laws, its credit, and its honor. When the issue comes we shall be ready to meet it whatever it may be ; and the nation and mankind will then never charge us with any wrong to liberty, order, humanity, or religion. We shall find, as we look and read on, that the book of destiny, though sealed, is still a book, and each seal as it is broken is revealing more and more of the writing of God, and showing our history to be part of His great and glorious Apocalypse. The red dragon and the horned monsters appear, but the Eternal Word on snow-white steed goes forth conquering and to conquer.