To touch for a moment upon another matter, the political ideals of the period preceding the Civil War were shockingly low in comparison with those of the present time. If there has been any graft in connection with the construction of our new $7,000,000 capitol, the public is as yet totally unconscious of the fact. Three-quarters of a century ago, on the contrary, we could not build even a forty-thousand-dollar capitol without a riot of mismanagement and dishonesty. The period of “Barstow and the balance,” and of the “forty thieves” signifies more than the addition of a picturesque phrase to our political annals. Instead of constituting a rare exception, the political morality which these phrases suggest was painfully commonplace in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. It was only a few years before we entered upon that great struggle that a powerful corporation brazenly established a pay-counter at the capital and bought with paltry silver the entire state legislature, and even the governor himself. Idealists are by no means satisfied with the political standards and practices of our public men of the present day, but they are lily-white in comparison with the similar standards of the fifties in Wisconsin. Or again, let us glance by way of comparison at the financial situation. The diary of Harvey Reid, published elsewhere in this magazine, affords an inkling, at least, of our deplorable financial condition in 1861. The national banking-system still lay in the womb of the future, while the treacherous “wild cats” flourished at the expense alike of private fortunes and public credit. With the first breath of war these institutions toppled in headlong ruin, notwithstanding that the state legislature, heedless of constitutional prohibitions, essayed vainly to prevent the crash. Within four days after the news of the firing on Fort Sumter, specie payments were suspended in Wisconsin; and the efforts of the government to float a war loan of $1,200,000 on the credit of the state of Wisconsin in the summer of 1861 met with dismal and inglorious failure. We do not remind the present generation of these things in any pharisaical attitude, but for the encouragement they afford to us at this time. The outstanding fact is that in the very face of such conditions as we have adverted to, Wisconsin girded herself for the task and played a noble part in the Civil War. We enter the present struggle immeasurably better prepared from almost every viewpoint than we did the one of old. If, as we believe, our people still retain a fair measure of pluck and ability, the record we are about to make should be correspondingly better than that of fifty years ago. THE QUESTION BOX