It is one of the calamities of war, that, while it compels the employment of large means, it blunts the moral sense, and breeds too frequently an insensibility to the obligations incurred. A national debt shares for the time the exceptional character of war itself. Contracted hastily, it is little regarded except as a burden. At last, when business is restored and all things assume their natural proportions, it is recognized in its true character. The country accommodates itself to the pressure. This time is now at hand among us, if not arrested by disturbing influences. Unhappily, the demands of Public Faith are met by higgling and chaffering, and we are gravely reminded that the “bloated bond-holders” now expect more than they gave,--forgetting that they gave in the darkness of the war, at the appeal of the Nation, and to keep those armies in the field through which its existence was preserved,--forgetting also that among these bond-holders, now so foully stigmatized, were the poor, as well as the rich, all giving according to their means. It was not in the ordinary spirit of money-lending that those contributions were made. Love of country entered into them, and made them more than money. If the interest was considerable, it was only in proportion to the risk. Every loan at that time was a contract of bottomry on the Nation,--like money lent to a ship in a strange port, and conditioned on its arrival safe at home,--so that it failed entirely, if Slavery, by the aid of Foreign Powers, established its supremacy. God be praised, the enemy has been overcome! It remains now that we should overcome that other enemy, which, hardly less malignant than war itself, would despoil the Nation of its good name and take from it all the might of honesty. And here to every citizen, and especially to every legislator, I would address those incomparable words of Milton in his sonnet to Fairfax:-- “Oh, yet a nobler task awaits thy hand, (For what can war but endless war still breed?) Till truth and right from violence be freed, _And Public Faith cleared from the shameful brand_ _Of public fraud_.”