The public debt will naturally disappear. Perhaps some fortunate speculator in petroleum or Erie stock will pay it off, rather than have it in the way, or see it left to bear the market inopportunely. The secret of making money scarce will lead doubtless to the discovery of making it plenty; and then the public debt, being of no use to anybody, will naturally stand aside, as poor relations in times of plenty. Besides, gentlemen being selected, not for their own interests, but for the public good, will, it is to be expected, donate their salaries to a sinking fund, which will carry it off, as some companies do their stockholders’ dividends, to unfathomed bottoms. In fact, if the debt could be cut up into dividends, nothing more would be heard of it. If the whole truth may be safely told, the difficulty in the extinguishment of the debt will not be so much in its undoubted disappearance, as in settling upon that plan among the numbers presented, which will be permitted to hurry it out of sight. Of course, when the Federal obligations quit, the State and city debts will not have the face to remain behind. These subjects out of the way, members of Congress, being then gentlemen, as well as educated, capable, and honest men, dragged unwillingly from and not into business, will deal with the few remaining topics with a wise silence,—and this course we take for grant-ed now; or else will discuss them and not each other, or the encyclopædia of unrelated questions, the publication of which now so enhances the price of paper. This improvement in our Congressional debates will have a corresponding advantage, also, to those foreigners who, desirous of learning our system, venture upon the speeches made at the Capitol, and, hopelessly misled by the terms employed, and the ferocious adjectives that commit horrible murders on almost every paragraph, confound our geography with that of the Cannibal Islands. We also take it for granted, that our public men will wait for events to justify the crude speculations, which they toss out in conversations with reporters, before cruelly amusing the good-natured public with their vaticinations. Possibly, too, the spread of common schools and Sunday schools, teaching grammar and morality, may lead to the disuse by our print-rushing politicians of styles of speech quite incomprehensible, and of words so raw in outline and so destitute of middle letters as to lead profane people to fancy that they are imitations of their own heedless expressions. Of course, in the better days now dawning, “rings” will only be used to tie quadrupeds to posts, or to restrain vicious bipeds in state prisons. Combinations to do good and increase the general happiness will naturally supplant those curious American circles, whose peripheries are not equidistant from the centre, but which consist in fact only of a centre, and that centre, self.