"Whether to settle peace, or to unfold The hollow drift of States, hard to be spelled; Then to advise how war may, best upheld, Move by _her two main nerves, iron and gold,_ In all her equipage." The list of his writings appended by Mr. Upham to his instructive biography of our _quondam_ fellow-citizen and governor[A] does not enable us to judge to which of his twenty-five works Milton particularly refers, in this magnificent commendation of Sir Henry Vane's financial skill. It might be inferred, however, from the significant union of iron and gold, as the "main nerves" of war, that he understood the importance of a specie currency, which in fact, in those days, was the only currency known. [Footnote A: Sir Henry Vane the Younger, being then twenty-three years of age, arrived in Boston in 1635, was chosen governor of the Colony in 1636, and returned to England the next year. His house stood, within the recollection of the writer, on what is now Tremont Street, on a spot opposite the Museum.] Our business, however, at present, is not with currency, but with taxes, which as long ago as Cicero's time were pronounced "the nerves of the State," and which, whether paid in gold or in what can in the present condition of the country be best substituted, must be allowed to be the great sympathetic nerve of the body-politic. Introduce a wise and efficient system of taxation, and life and energy will pervade the country. Without such a system it will soon sink into a general and fatal paralysis. The country is engaged at this moment in a struggle of unexampled magnitude. The great wars of the last generation in Europe gathered no army equal in magnitude to that which the Government of the United States has, within little more than six months, called into being. Its naval operations, so far as concerns the extent of sea-coast effectively blockaded, and considering the condition of that branch of the service at the breaking out of the war, will not suffer in comparison with those of England in the wars of the French Revolution. England is now threatening to take part against us in this war, waged by the first State (according to Mr. Vice-president Stephens) ever avowedly founded on Slavery as its corner-stone, on the ground that our blockade of the Southern ports is not effectual,--forgetting, apparently, that our last war with her was in part to resist her pretended right to seal up with a paper blockade every port in the French Empire.