Pecuniary Independence—What Is It? [pp. 472-474]

PECUNIARY INDEPENDENCE.
Webster and Henry Clay, and others of that illustrious galaxy
that once adorned and honored our national councils. It needs
but the simple mention of their names to suggest a magnanimity and wisdom commensurate with the greatness of the occasion-impossible for the mind to associate those names with
that narrow, bigoted policy, by which spiteful demagogues
are so ambitious to manifest their sectional prejudices.
Whatever excuse there may have been for bitterness of feeling and severity while the South occupied a position of hostility to the Union, no such excuse now exists, for the South
has abandoned that position. She has shown every disposition
to accept as final the decisions of the late war, and to submit
unmurmuringly to her changed condition. The ordinance of
secession has been everywhere revoked, the statutes of every
State that had thus far had an opportunity of acting have been
purged of every obnoxious act, their constitutions amended in
conformity with the new order of things; and what shows still
more conclusively her sincerity, she has called to offices of
honor and trust, both in State and Federal affairs, only those
who were known to be most favorable to the restoration and
erpetuity of the Union. What more could be required of
ter? The North and West owe i&to themselves and to the
common good of the country, to repudiate those who are so
fatally bent upon perpetuating those party and sectional animosities that have hitherto been so disastrous, and which can
never result in any thing but evil.
ARTI. III.-PECUNIARY INDEPENDENCE-WHAT IS IT?
WE believe good men and bad men, slaveholders and nonslaveholders, Northerners and Southerners, all alike, desire to
become at least moderately independent of their pecuniary
circumstances.
The desire we think not only natural, but very meritorious.
It incites to energy and industry, and protnmotes economy and
frugality. In fact, without this universal desire, and the action
it begets, society would stagnate and retrograde, and civilization gradually disappear. Were all content to live on the proceeds of the labor of their own hands, there would be very
little work done by any; for no one would, by his own labor,
be willing to produce more than the simplest necessaries of life,
in a society where all were poor and plain.
Yet while all desire to become independent, not one man in
ten thousand understands what constitutes independence, nor
what he is engaged in whilst successfully endeavoring to
achieve independence.
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