But ah, what a lotus-dream we were a-dreaming, when from out our blue sky the bolt of war fell upon us! We lived in a land in which no one was hungry, none naked, none a-cold; where no man begged, and no man was a criminal, no woman fell—from necessity; where no one asked for bread, and all, even the slaves, could give it; where Charity was unknown, and in her stead stood Hospitality, with open doors. What tidings we had, meanwhile, of the things of the outer world, made us cherish all the more fondly the quietude of our Sleepy Hollow. The nations, had they not filled the air for a century past with the murmur of their unrest? Revolutions, rebellions, barricades, bread-riots,—agrarianism, communism, the frowning hosts of capital and labor—the rumor of these grisly facts and grislier phantoms reached us, but from afar, and as an echo merely; and lulled, by our exemption from these ills, into a fatal security, we failed to perceive the breakers upon which we were slowly but surely drifting. The lee-shore upon which our ship was so somnolently rocking was nothing less than bankruptcy. Spendthrifts, we dreamed that our inheritance was too vast ever to be dissipated; nay, we fondly imagined that we were adding to our substance. Did not our statesmen, our Able Editors, unceasingly assure us that we were the richest people on the globe, and growing daily richer? And what had been that inheritance? A noble, virgin land, unsurpassed, all things considered, anywhere,—a land that cost us nothing beyond the beads of Captain Smith and the bullets of his successors,—a land which no mortgages smothered, no tax-gatherer devoured. But smothered and devoured it was, and by our slaves.